Faculty
Mentors
Here
is a list of faculty mentors involved with this REU Site. Applicants are
encouraged to look at the websites to get a better idea about their research.
Research
projects
We
will offer research projects in the following areas.
- Optical communications
and networking
- Optical and photonic
devices
- Optical systems
Here are a few samples on the types of research projects.
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Project
1
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Indoor
Visible-light Communication test-bed and simulator.
Role of Undergraduate Student: The key deliverable for
this project is to provide an easily accessible software toolkit to
evaluate the lighting and communications performance of VLC systems. The
essential components of the project are broken into the 5 primary objectives:
1.
Provide an open source toolkit for higher layer
evaluation of RF/VLC HetNets.
2.
Evaluate the physical channel effects (location,
rotation, blocking).
3.
Evaluate the effects of the optical front end (Source /
LED, Photosensor / optics).
4.
Evaluate the effects of modulation (scheme and resource
allocation).
5.
Evaluate the lighting / illumination in the environment.
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Project
2
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Indoor
location determination based on VLC communication systems.
Role of Undergraduate Student: In this project, the
undergraduate student will work on understanding the various techniques
used in indoor positioning systems based on VLC, WiFi,
BLE, RFID, etc. The student may also develop applications and hardware
systems for testing of algorithms. A background in microcontroller as well
as introductory-level experience in mobile app development would be
helpful.
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Project
3
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Fabrication
and characterization of III-nitride nanowire light-emitting diodes.
Role of Undergraduate Student: Prospective student
will investigate the design, molecular beam epitaxial growth, fabrication,
and fundamental characterizations of InGaN/GaN nanoscale LED heterostructures monolithically grown on Si substrates.
More specifically, student will work closely with a graduate
student/postdoctoral researcher: to fully understand the device structure,
operation, theoretical calculation and the design of high efficiency
nanowire LEDs; to investigate the epitaxial growth and fundamental
structural, electronic and optical properties of core-shell based InGaN/Ga(Al)N dot-in-a-wire nanoscale heterostructures on
Si; to perform analysis of the device reliability, thermal stability, heat
transport, and packaging of nanowire LEDs. The undergraduate students will
identify the wavelengths that the device can emit by several MATLAB
calculations and TCAD simulations.
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Project
4
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Optically
tunable nanomaterial for solar cells.
Role of Undergraduate Student: The participating
undergraduate students will investigate the principle of quantum mechanics
that enables optical tunability in colloidal
infrared nanocrystals. Quantum mechanics, indeed,
is an intimidating subject for many students and it is important to provide
experimental demonstration to aid the understanding of difficult
theoretical concepts. The learning goals of the undergraduate project are:
1.
Characterize optical absorption of lead chalcogenide nanocrystals and
obtain fundamental understanding of quantum confinement through
experimental and theoretical analyses.
2.
Fabricate and test the photovoltaic performance
parameters of solar cell fiber and obtain understanding of the detailed
balance equation in nanocrystal solar cells.
Our research program challenges students to go beyond
the scientific textbook, develop inquiring minds, and be involved in
hands-on interdisciplinary nanotechnology research.
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Project
5
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Optical
coherence tomography for the guidance of microsurgery: Low cost beam
profiling system for Gaussian beam characterization.
Role of Undergraduate Student: Undergraduate students
will establish a low cost beam profiling system to characterize Gaussian
beam exiting fiber optic OCT probes and evaluate the imaging properties of
the probes. In this project, students will gain in-depth knowledge and
hands-on experience in fiber optics. They will be trained to acquire,
analyze and present results obtained from scientific experiments. Briefly,
students will build a beam profiling system that uses a microscopic
objective followed by an achromatic doublet lens (focal length =100mm) to
expand the Gaussian beam output from the fiber optic probe.
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Project
6
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2-D
Imaging of Plasmonic-Structures
Role of Undergraduate Student: Undergraduate students
will simulate plasmonic/polaritonic
structures at the IR region and assess their local field intensity. This
study is important for understanding the role of local versus extended plasmonic/polaritonic modes
in the amplification process of IR and Raman signals. Later, the UG
student(s) will obtain experimental scan Raman data from test molecules
(bio or dye) on graphene-coated screens.
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Project
7
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Optical
image steganalysis and forensics
Role of Undergraduate Student: Undergraduate students
will conduct some experiments using the existing techniques to figure out
the optimal (sub-optimal) hyper-parameters and activation functions for
DNNs we have already designed and through implementation.
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Project
8
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Optical
and photonics research awareness multiplatform survey instrument and data
collection system
Role of Undergraduate Student: The REU student working
on this project will have some background in database development and web
application development, as well as introductory-level experience in mobile
app development. Machine learning and basic statistics techniques are also
helpful.
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Contact
Information
For
any inquiries, please contact Dr. Abdallah Khreishah at abdallah@njit.edu or (973)596-3528
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