Sonny Vo's Defense Friday 2pm CisAud. Reception at 1:45pm

Dear labmembers,

After 5+ years of working alongside so many of you, i am ready to depart our stone roof museum. I leave with so many fond memories working day and nights with so many of you. The staffs, from Mary and Ed who had helped me get started with my 8 masks process flow during my first two years to Maurice who only just a few months ago held my hand through a critical wafer dicing operation. I feel truly lucky to be around such outstanding people that i do not want to work anywhere else but nearby.

 So what i ended up doing was I went down the street along PageMills, knocked on the door of HP Labs and convinced them to give me a job in exchange for some boy scout cookies i had bought in front of the San Antonio Walmart. It worked! 21st century entrepreneurship at work here.  Some of you are probably saying 'oh crap!' but yes you haven't gotten rid of me yet! :) 

Warmest Regards,
Sonny

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Department of Applied physics, Stanford University
research group: http://snow.stanford.edu/index.html
626-216-4597

Towards Near Field Applications using Nano-Aperture VCSELs: 

Near-field optical microscopy requires extremely high optical fields in proximity to the object being probed.  However, when light propagates through conventional circular or square shaped apertures, the power-throughput decays as the fourth power of the aperture size. We present a vast diversity of unconventionally-shaped apertures exhibiting extra-ordinary enhancement in both power transmission and near-field intensity that can be one million times greater than the conventional circular- or square-shaped apertures. These apertures can be shaped like a C , an L or a bowtie.   They can also be iterated into a fractal-structure resulting in many interesting optical properties or can be enhanced by plasmonic rings. Experiments using electron-energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) with sub-nanometer resolution revealed the near-field spot-size and the plasmon energy ranges of the apertures.

 

These unconventional apertures and arrays of such apertures were incorporated into Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs); this integrated near-field device demonstrated a power density of 50mW/μm², five times larger than the power density required for high-density optical recording. Finally, a novel architecture that combines a VCSEL with an NSOM-like tip (VCSEL nanoscope) into an integrated device will be presented.  The VCSEL nanoscope can serve as a powerful device to manipulate and probe the nanoscale such as single molecule manipulation and detection, high throughput wafer defect detection and near-field coupling to waveguides for optical interconnects.