Ever had the urge to slip your 500-gigabyte desktop computer into your back pocket?
Koblar Alan Jackson is making no promises, but the Central Michigan University professor's research in nanophotonics may help lay the groundwork for future generations of computer downsizing.
Think technology that one day could make the iPod's microcircuits resemble the oversize vacuum tubes in your grandfather's TV.
"Miniaturization is good," said Jackson, a professor of physics in the CMU College of Science and Technology. "The power of your cell phone or PDA tells you that miniaturization can be very good."
Not surprisingly, the key to smallness may lie in the study of entities invisible to the naked eye - nanostructures. These are typically clusters of atoms with dimensions that are from 10,000 to 100,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.
A focus of Jackson's research is studying the behavior of light in different kinds of nanostructures, which may lead in coming decades to advancements in low-power, high speed processing chips.
He doesn't physically create or manipulate the nanostructures, which is very time-consuming and expensive. His research is strictly computational - a series of computer exercises that examines how hypothetical nanostructures fare in different circumstances.
Do silicon nanostructures - containing 50 or fewer atoms - behave differently from larger scale silicon structures, like those that make up computer chips, when different forces are applied to them? The answers to such questions may help researchers decide whether nano-level silicon makes an effective conduit for light or electricity.
So far, Jackson said, it is clear that the bonding between atoms in silicon nanostructures is very different from conventional silicon bonds.
Jackson is pretty adept at making these computational projections, since he helped create the software he uses for his research while serving as a postdoctoral associate under Mark Pederson at the Naval Research Laboratory in the late 1980s.
Jackson collaborates with Pederson and with scientists at the Illinois-based Argonne National Lab on nanophotonics research, funded by a three-year, $270,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. They now are applying for a $200,000 renewal grant.
One question Jackson's research raises is how small things really need to be. Some people complain their cell phones are already so small that they have trouble punching in a number to order pizza.
Jackson doesn't concern himself with such questions. He's more curious about how things work at the nanoscale level, and he sees the applications as challenges for another scientist.
Nevertheless, he smiles when he talks about one timely research project that may one day help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. In June, he submitted a research proposal with Pederson and a colleague from the University of Texas-El Paso to the Department of Energy to develop nanostructures that would harvest solar energy by mimicking aspects of biological photosynthesis.
Current solar energy devices use semiconductor wafers that are relatively inefficient in converting sunlight into electrical energy. Jackson hopes their proposed research will lead to cheaper and more efficient ways to tap the sun's energy. It may even help consumers avoid the sky-high gas prices one finds today at the pump.
http://www.cmich.edu