Facilities

The Duke NanoPhotonics (DNP) Laboratory designs, fabricates, and characterizes nano-optical devices.

Design: The DNP Group owns one cluster computer and ten workstations. The cluster computer is equipped with 10 CPUs and 24 GB memory, and most of workstations have 8 GB memory with Intel Core 2 Duo or Quad CPU. We use three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) codes and plane-wave expansion (PWE) codes run on each computer for solving Maxwell’s equations and designing nano-optical devices. As for FDTD modeling, the DNP Laboratory uses Meep available from MIT and Rsoft’s FullWAVE. The Group also has an access to 25 department-owned computers, each of which is equipped with 4 GB memory and Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The Group has the demonstrated capability of designing nano-optical devices.

Fabrication and Characcterization: A two hundreds square feet cleanroom (class 1000) is equipped with a vertical laminar flow fume hood for wet-process. A scanning electron microscope (SEM) with a thermal field emission gun (Zeiss DSM 982 FEG) is in the cleanroom for sample observation. A resolution of the thermal field-emission SEM is 1 nm at 30 kV. An Olympus BX-61 (bright-field, dark-field, and Nomarski modes) with a CCD camera, and a Karl-Suss wafer scriber, a wet-oxidation furnace, a resist-spin-coater, chemically-assisted ion-beam etching (CAIBE) machine, plasma asher, precision hot-plate, vacuum oven, and convection oven are also in the clean environments. A chemically-assisted ion beam etching machine is used to conduct high-selectivity anisotropic etching for GaAs, InP, GaN, silicon and so on. Chlorine and xenon difluoride gases as well as argon are available. For sample fabrication, the DNP Group uses Elionix’s 50kV electron beam lithography, two ICP-RIEs (chlorine based and fluorine based ones), evaporators, and sputtering equipments at Duke SMIF.

Two optical tables on active isolation legs allow us to conduct sensitive optical measurements including characterization of photonic crystal nanocavities and waveguides. A microscopy cryostat is installed in a micro-PL/EL system, which includes an optical spectrum analyzer, a pumping diode laser with a 150 MHz pulse-generator, a 55 cm scanning monochromator, a LN2-cooled silicon CCD camera, a LN2-cooled InGaAs detector, an optical chopper, a DSP lock-in amplifier, probe micropositioners, and a power/energy detector. For sensitive beam alignment, xyz piezo-electric nano-positioners (Physik Instrumente) are available. A nanophotonic waveguide characterization setup includes teltecom tunable laser, isolator, optical switch, polarization controller, circulator, linear polarizer, PM lensed fiber, coupler, OSA and power meter.

Duke Shared Materials Instrumentation Facilities (SMIF)

The SMIF provide researchers at Duke with high quality and cost-effective access to advanced materials characterization and fabrication capabilities, and consists of Fabrication Laboratory, SEM laboratory, and Instrumentation Laboratory. The facilities are located on the 1st floor of the Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics. Their Fabrication Laboratory includes 50 kV electron beam lithography system, photolithography equipments, evaporators, wet-benches, elipsometer, and film-thickness measurement equipment, rapid thermal annealer, two ICP-RIEs, sputtering machines, and furnaces. The Group uses a CF4-based ICP-RIE for silicon dioxide anisotropic etching and a Cl2-based ICP-RIE for anisotropic etching of silicon and III-V materials including GaAs and InP. A critical-point dryer is used to dry photonic crystal membrane samples. The Instrumentation Laboratory owns TEM, AFM, dicing saw, XPS, and X-ray diffractometer.

Contact Us

Professor Tomoyuki Yoshie

Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University

101 Science Drive

Durham, NC 27708-0291.