Micron-scale photonic devices integrated with standard CMOS processes have the potential to dramatically increase system bandwidths, performance, and configuration flexibility while reducing system power. Small devices have many advantages: reduced power, increased density, and increased speed. By integrating many thousands of these devices on a chip, photonics could potentially be used for most high-speed off-chip and global on-chip communication.  Integrated photonics has many advantages at the board and rack scale as well.

Energy consumption in our society is increasing rapidly. A significant fraction of the energy is lost in the form of heat. In this talk we introduce solid-state thermionic/ thermoelectric devices that allow direct conversion of heat into electricity. Novel metal-semiconductor nanocomposites are developed where the heat and charge transport are modified at the atomic level. Theory and experiment are compared for the case of rare-earth nanoparticles in a semiconductor matrix as well as in nitride metal/semiconductor multilayer films. High thermoelectric figure-of-merit >1 is achieved.

We currently are seeing an unprecedented global effort to reduce carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and oceans and combat global warming. Even in these times of significant change, many don’t truly understand the sources of their energy or the environmental and economic benefits (and downsides) of the alternatives. Coal, for example, is a vital source of energy for the world’s electricity (50% in America and 70% in China), yet it contributes 40% of the world’s carbon dioxide.

Thermoelectrics are being used for applications such as heating and cooling car seats. New applications include personal air conditioning, improving the gas mileage of automobiles, and solar thermal power generation. Learn about some of these new applications, and new materials being designed to achieve better efficiency in these applications. Nanoparticles in materials are being used to improve the performance of thermoelectrics.

The design and synthesis of organic molecules and polymers for applications in organic light emitting diodes and organic photovoltaics will be presented.

$14 SEC members, $20 non-members.
For more information, contact Barbara Keaney (E-mail scieng@silcom.com) or call (805) 684-4927. 
Reservations not required. Visit our web page at http://www.scieng.org

Pump-probe techniques, which measure the response of a material to an external perturbation, are often used to study condensed matter systems. Generally, the magnitude of the measured response decreases with decreasing system size.  Therefore measurements based on pump-probe techniques can become difficult for nanometer-scale structures.  The fluctuation-dissipation theorem guarantees that the properties of a system can also be determined from its intrinsic fluctuations.

The large-scale use of photovoltaics is becoming a reality, with more than 3 GW of solar cells produced worldwide in 2007. However, it is anticipated that on the order of 100 GW or more of solar cells will be called for within the next few years. For 100 GW of photovoltaic power, the conventional "flat-plate" approach would require ~500 km2 of cells, a daunting challenge. A significant part of the solution is likely to be "concentrator" photovoltaics using optics to focus large areas of light onto much smaller ultrahigh-efficiency solar cells.

Contacts are a key area for defining the performance and stability of OPV devices. We will discuss both new analytical studies on the stability and behavior of conventional and inverted contact geometries. We will present recent results on the use of thin oxide layers on InSnOx and ZnO contacts to improve performance and stability including TiO2, gradient doped ZnO and NiO. We will also present results on using time resolved microwave conductivity measurements (TRMC) to look at the inherent properties of the polymer and the bulk heterojunction.