Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

This grant application is for a critical equipment for the Advanced Materials and Process Engineering Laboratory (AMPEL) Nanofabrication Facility (ANF) -- a metal evaporator. The evaporator requested is a load-locked electron-beam evaporator, which will be used to deposit very high purity metals including Ti, Ni, Ge, Au, Pt, Al. The system features a load-lock that: a) allows the metals to be stored under vacuum, thus ensuring their purity, b) provides a much faster system pump-down, critical for a multi-user facility. The metals evaporated will be used to fabricate low-resistance electrical contacts for: a) High-Speed Semiconductor Lasers -- Transistor Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs), and Transistor Semiconductor Micro-ring Lasers for the next generation high-speed optical interconnects b) Graphene nano-electronic circuits c) Molecular Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata (MQCA) circuits d) Organic Transistors e) Carbon Nanotube-based ultra-high-frequency vacuum transistor f) Optical control in novel reflectance-modulated devices, for display applications g) Sensors for volatile organic compounds The metal will also be used for lab-on-a-chip biomedical applications, including: a) Sensors using surface plasmons in metallic surfaces b) Electrical heaters in microfluidic devices for biomedical applications. c) Implantable microelectrodes for recording neural signals in neuroprosthetics Other applications include: Surface Plasmon Polaritons (SPP) waveguides, optical cavities, and modulators for optical communications; beta-NMR to study the electronic and magnetic properties of thin films.