Dr. Tony Huang, James Henderson Assistant Professor in Engineering Science and Mechanics, and group has been highlighted in the Nature Materials journal on their work in ‘molecular plasmonics.’ Plasmonic systems that can manipulate and guide light at subwavelength scales should prove useful for developing nanoscale photonic integrated circuits. To realise molecular active plasmonics, a reversible shift of localized surface plasmon resonances of nanostructures by changing the interactions between molecular resonances and surface plasmon resonances is required. Tony Jun Huang and colleagues now show that a gold nanodisk array coated with rotaxane molecules and exposed to chemical reductants and oxidants exhibits reversible plasmon-based switching. This molecular plasmonic device can be operated by switching the extinction properties of a bistable rotaxane and the reversible switching correlates with the chemically driven mechanical switching observed for surface-bound rotaxane molecules. This correlation, supported by controlled experiments and a DFT microscopic model, suggest that nanoscale movement with surface-bound molecular machines can be used as the active components of plasmonic devices.

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* Source: Nature Materials Journal

Professor Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Charles Godfrey Binder Professor in Engineering Science and Mechanics, is invited to present a paper and participate in the Publications Committee meeting of SPIE. The meeting is scheduled for January 25 - 29 in San Jose, California. To learn more about the conference, please visit their web site.

Streaming videos online with the quality of high-end home theater systems and computer programs running a thousand times faster are some of the things that may be possible with research advances being made by a team led by Dr. Tony Jun Huang, the James Henderson assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics. Tony’s Biofunctionalized NanoElectroMechanicalSystems (BioNEMS) group has developed a working plasmonic switch, the first step in building optical computers with frequencies 100,000 times greater than the ones of current microprocessors. Dr. Huang explained, "Computer chips have circuits.
Today's electronic circuits are good and small, but they're slow and have low capacity, relatively speaking. To make the big jump, we need to develop photonic circuits. Photonic circuits use light to carry information, similar to the technology behind fiber optic cables, and have higher speeds and higher capacities. But the problem with photonic circuits is that they're too big."
The answer, Tony said, is to create something that combines the speed and capacity of photonic circuits with the small size of electronic circuits -- a plasmonic circuit.

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Dr. Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Charles Godfrey Binder Professor in Engineering Science and Mechanics, delivered an invited tutorial lecture entitled “Sculptured Thin Films as Nanoengineered Metamaterials” on December 15, 2008 at an international conference held in New Delhi, India.

For more information on Photonics 2008: International Conference on Fiber Optics and Photonics, please visit their web site.

Dr. Dinesh Agrawal, Professor of Materials, and Engineering Science and Mechanics, and Director of Microwave Processing and Engineering Center gave invited talks at the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), Singapore and University Tenaga Nesional, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, on "Microwave processing of various materials and its advantages: An overview” on December 19 and 21, 2008.

Source: Penn State Newswire.

Dr. Lawrence Freidman, assistant professor in engineering science and mechanics, will be attending the SPIE Photonics West conference in San Jose, California from January 25 - 29, 2009. To read more about the SPIE conference, please visit their website.