Investigating self assembly techniques to fabricate arrays of nanoparticle and nanowires and their applications in sensing and photonic devices

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In this proposal we focus our research activities on the following two projects: a) Fabrication of arrays of nanoparticles and study of surface plasmon materials. The colloidal crystals are the simplest photonic crystals to show band-gaps for propagation of electromagnetic radiation in a particular direction. Porous metallic films have interesting optical properties and have applications principally as photonic materials in many industries like communication systems. In this project, the theory of surface plasmon for various quantum dots array configurations will be also studied. The acquired knowledge from the results of these fundamental studies will be used to fabricate large photonic surfaces. b) Field Effect Gas Sensor based on Nanowire Arrays.  Gas sensor technology plays a major role to improve security of the nation, the environmental health and safety. In this proposal we introduce and fabricate a novel miniaturized solid-state non-chemical gas sensor built around vertically aligned nanowire arrays. The structure is intended to offer enhanced selectivity, sensitivity and speed of response compared to others sensors. Our device, works by fingerprinting the ionization characteristic of the unknown gas.  In this proposal the following two objectives are investigated. I) Theoretical and experimental researches on fundamental issues related to array configuration of dielectric and metallic nanoparticles. The tasks to be studied are: a) Issues related to synthesis of self-assembled nanoparticles, materials, size, shape, and their uniformity. b) Investigation on linearity of array configuration of the nanoparticles and their application to fabricate photonic crystals. II) Investigation on design and fabrication of gas sensor based on nanowires. The tasks to be studied are: a) Techniques to fabrication of nanowires, including the possibilities of using anisotropic etching of silicon to fabricate these structures, and characterization of the fabricated nanowires. b) Applying acquired knowledge to fabricate the final gas sensor device, design, modeling, and fabrication.