Course Papers and Presentations are now available at www.ece.rochester.edu/courses/ECE580/docs/. Please note that you will need a PDF viewer, a Microsoft PowerPoint viewer and a Microsoft Word document viewer to view the contents of the documents.

Nanoscience (giving nanometer-size objects properties their constituent material does not have in Nature) and nanotechnology (the use of these objects to perform useful functions in devices) allow scientists and engineers to routinely do what was long thought to be impossible. The purposes of this course are to provide an introduction to the scientific foundations of nanoscience and the materials science that makes it possible, and to focus on developments in three major domains of applications, electronics, photonics, and biosensing. Graduate students from all the engineering departments, physics, and chemistry should find this course of interest. Graduate students from other departments or qualified undergraduate students may enroll with permission of the instructor.

PROVISIONAL COURSE CONTENT

This course, under development thanks to NSF sponsorship, is offered for the first time in the spring '05 semester. The following is a course content description that is likely to evolve during the semester. It is expected that this course will become a regular offering.

Part 1: Fundamentals
Intro to quantum mechanics: Schrodinger's equation, wave functions, probability density
Particle in a box quantization in 1-, 2-, and 3-D, tunneling
Density of states, matrix elements
Bulk and surface states, dangling bonds, core-shell structures
Basic transport properties: miniband formation, hopping, resonant tunneling
Mechanisms of energy and charge transfer
Other bulk and surface excitations: phonons, plasmons,…

Part 2: Materials Science
Bottom-up growth methods: gas, liquid, and solid phase growth, MBE, MOCVD (semiconductors, insulators, and metals)
Top-down methods: advanced lithography, non-planar surfaces
Mixed methods: etching, porosification,….

Part 3: Optical Properties/Devices
Intro to optical measurements: reflection, transmission, luminescence, ellipsometry, SERS, SPR,…
Coulombic attraction and formation of excitions and bi-excitons
Time-resolved experiments (pump-probe, wavemixing, photoluminescence)
LEDs and lasers with reduced dimensionality objects and in random media
Single dot spectroscopy
Quantum cascade devices
Effective media approximations
Rare earths and other phosphors

Part 4: Electrical properties/Devices
Resonant tunnel diodes
CMOS scaling
Memory elements
Single electron devices
Conductor-insulator transition
Transport in dense or sparse quantum dot arrays and in fractals

Part 5: Biosensing
Quantum dots for tagging
Silicon-based biosensors
Resonant biosensors
In-vitro and in-vivo applications
DNA scaffolding