September 2003
UofT researcher receives top MIT honour
Leads research in “buckyballs” for fibre optic materials
A University of Toronto electrical and computer engineering professor, currently leading cutting edge research in the use of “buckyballs” in new materials for fibre optic communications, has been named one of the world’s top young innovators by MIT’s Technology Review.
Prof. Edward (Ted) H. Sargent, Nortel Networks - Canada Research Chair in Emerging Technologies and professor at U of T's Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering was named “one of the world’s top young innovators” in the TR100, a group of 100 creative individuals under age 35, drawn from a broad spectrum of fields, whose research will shape how we live and work in the future.
Also sharing the honour is Alex Vasilescu, a PhD candidate in the U of T’s Department of Computer Science, selected for her innovative research on anti-terrorism technologies, including face recognition and human motion analysis. Her research in face recognition resulted in TensorFaces, a unified mathematical framework for face recognition that could have an immediate impact on the security and biometrics industries.
They are profiled in the October 2003 issue of Technology Review magazine.
Using molecules resembling 60-sided soccer balls, Prof. Sargent and Carleton University chemistry professor Wayne Wang led a team of researchers that succeeded in creating a new material for processing information using light.
The material combines microscopic spherical particles - known as "buckyballs" - with polyurethane, the polymer used as a coating on cars and furniture. The buckyballs, given the chemical notation C60, are clusters of 60 carbon atoms resembling soccer balls that are only a few nanometres in diameter. (A nanometre equals a billionth of a metre.)
When the mixture of polyurethane and buckyballs is used as a thin film on a flat surface, light particles travelling though the material pick up each others' patterns. These materials have the capacity to make the delivery and processing of information in fibre-optic communications more efficient.
"In our high-optical-quality films, light interacts 10-to-100 times more strongly with itself, for all wavelengths used in optical fibre communications, than in previously reported C60-based materials," said Sargent. "We've also shown for the first time that we can meet commercial engineering requirements: the films perform well at 1550 nanometres, the wavelength used to communicate information over long distances."
“This work proves that 'designer molecules' synthesized using nanotechnology can have powerful implications for future generations of computing and communications networks."
The research was supported by the Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund, Nortel Networks, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canada Research Chairs Program, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Innovation Trust.
Prof. Sargent, who says he is looking forward to taking advantage of the collaborative networking capabilities of the ORION network, is the author of over one hundred papers in refereed journals and presented at international conferences. He has delivered invited addresses at leading technical conferences in the U.S., Japan, and Europe in the areas of microwave photonics, communications, and nanotechnology. More information can be obtained at the Sargent Group web site. Alex Vasilescu's work is profiled on her research page.
The team’s research parallels other research at the university into a new class of microscopic crystal structures, which is bringing high bandwidth optical microchips one step closer to efficient, large-scale fabrication.
The structures, known as photonic band gap (PBG) materials, could usher in an era of speedy computer and telecommunications networks that use light instead of electrons.
"This will be a tremendous breakthrough," said Sajeev John, a professor in U of T's Department of Physics and co-investigator of the study published in the June 7-13 issue of Physical Review Letters.
"It's basically a whole new set of architectures for manufacturing nearly perfect photonic band gap materials and will provide an enormous increase in the available bandwidth for the optical microchip."
Prof. John and his team devised a photonic band gap blueprint that can be made with nanometre-scale precision by bombarding it with x-rays. The x-rays pass through a gold "mask" with an array of holes, removing portions of a polymer template below. Glass is deposited to fill in the holes and the remaining polymer burned away with heat. Silicon is then deposited throughout the void regions of the glass template and the glass finally removed with chemicals, leaving behind a pure silicon photonic band gap material.
The study was co-written with physics graduate student Ovidiu Toader and Mona Berciu, a physics professor at the University of British Columbia, and funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Back to Headlines
|
|
