A University of Washington-led center for optoelectronics - technologies that combine light and electronics - brings researchers from 14 universities across the U.S. together with the mission to develop new materials to transform information technology with light. This research has broad ranging applications, from enabling photorealistic virtual reality displays for telehealth calls, to secure, optical quantum communication links to ensure that data remains private on the internet.
Founded in 2021 as a U.S. National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, the NSF Center for Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand, or NSF IMOD, has received a second round of funding from the NSF to continue its work for the next five years.
The research tackled by NSF IMOD is so interdisciplinary that it requires researchers from backgrounds such as chemistry, physics, engineering and materials science to work together.
"There's still this idea that scientists go in their labs, put on their safety goggles and lab coats, and then work alone for hours at a time. The point of this center is to tackle problems that are too big for one scientist or even two or three to tackle by themselves," said NSF IMOD director David Ginger, UW professor of chemistry. "We have all these people from different disciplines working together to advance optoelectronics and semiconductor technology that we couldn't do just as individual scientists."
The center has already seen success with quantum dots. These materials, which are 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, generate very specific colors of light depending on their size. Currently, quantum dots are used in display screens, such as in QLED TVs, but they may help advance quantum computing - if researchers can figure out how to tailor their properties and add them to computer chips.
"Until our center came along, quantum dots were thought of as something you made in a beaker in a chemistry lab. And if you could paint them on a TV or phone display, that was great," said Ginger, who is also the B. Seymour Rabinovitch Endowed Chair in Chemistry and the chief scientist at the UW Clean Energy Institute. "But they weren't something that you could put as a discrete component in an optoelectronic circuit. That's something that we've proven you can do."
With chemists, material scientists, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, physicists and electrical engineers on the team, researchers at NSF IMOD created something unprecedented: a way to print quantum dots, essentially through an inkjet printer. The team showed that they could strategically place quantum dots into specific cavities, which could one day be the building blocks for quantum communication, and possibly even quantum computing.
The team hopes to continue this research direction over the next five years, further refining quantum dots as well as the cavities the dots get placed into.
NSF IMOD's interdisciplinary nature gets passed down to its students as well. One of the center's main goals is to develop researchers into leaders in the fields of semiconductor and optoelectronic technology. Every summer, NSF IMOD trainees from different disciplines come together at the UW for an intensive weeklong crash course in multiple disciplines. The students synthesize quantum dots, study single photons of light in UW's Quantum Technologies Training and Testbed lab, make quantum dots, and learn to calculate the electronic structures of advanced materials. The collaborations established during this course and throughout the NSF IMOD training program helps students graduate with the ability to work in complex, interdisciplinary teams.
Trainees also gain real-world experience in the form of internships at a variety of companies, including some of NSF IMOD's industry and national lab partners. A partial list of NSF IMOD's partners includes UbiQD, Inc.; Nanopattern Technologies, Inc.; FOM Technologies, Inc.; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Tandem PV, Inc.; and Nanosys-Shoei Chemical, Inc. More partner information can be found on NSF IMOD's website.
"We're already seeing our students get hired at everything from startup companies to large semiconductor firms for the exact skills they're being trained for in the center," Ginger said. "We're really excited to see our students start taking important roles, and then eventually we hope they move into leadership roles in this space of commercializing new semiconductor materials."
And it's not just graduate students who benefit from NSF IMOD. The center hosts a Research Experience for Undergraduates program, and has programming for younger students as well. As part of their science communication training, NSF IMOD trainees become Quantum LEAP ambassadors who can facilitate outreach events, such as at the Pacific Science Center. The team has also developed a quantum education portal for K-12 teachers to find lesson plans to use in their own classrooms.
"Just as the atomic structure of a quantum dot produces unique and exciting properties, the exceptionally interdisciplinary structure of NSF IMOD is enabling foundational science and technological innovations that would not otherwise be possible," said Birgit Schwenzer, a program director in the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, which manages NSF IMOD.
Over the past five years, NSF IMOD has published 140 papers, hosted 36 undergraduate students through its REU program and hosted more than 85 outreach events.
"One day I hope that we'll have photonic computing where we're massively reducing the energy cost for computation by using a computing paradigm that's based on the research we're doing now," Ginger said. "That's the kind of thing that's probably still a decade or more away. But that's why the government invests in basic science now, because the basic science research of the materials today leads to technology that exists 15 years from now."
NSF is expected to provide NSF IMOD $22 million over the five-year term of the award. The 14 academic institutions that make up NSF IMOD are the University of Washington; University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University; University of Chicago; Northwestern University; University of Pennsylvania; University of Maryland; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Colorado Boulder; Arizona State University; Rice University; Lehigh University; City College of New York; and University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
In addition to Ginger, other UW faculty involved with NSF IMOD include Kai-Mei Fu, associate professor of physics and of electrical and computer engineering at the UW; Brandi Cossairt, a UW professor of chemistry; Lih Lin, professor of electrical and computer engineering; Devin MacKenzie, associate professor of mechanical engineering and of materials science and engineering, and technical director of the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds; and Arka Majumdar, professor of physics and of electrical and computer engineering. Fu chairs UW Quantum X. Fu, Lin and Majumdar are faculty members with the UW Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems. Cossairt, Fu, Lin, Majumdar and MacKenzie are member faculty at the Clean Energy Institute. Ginger, Fu, Lin, Majumdar and MacKenzie are faculty researchers with the UW Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute.
