We have developed capabilities  for a variety of synthesis methods to produce materials for internal research and for our collaborators. Here’s a brief overview of where our efforts are presently focused:

• Physical vapor deposition of thin films, nanowires and nanoribbons of cadmium sulfide (CdS) using home-made equipment.
• Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) of thin films and nanostructures.
• Rapid hydrothermal synthesis of novel ceramic nano-crystals with tailored doping for laser refrigeration applications.
• Ultrafast sol-gel synthesis of graphene aerogels with tailored loadings and texturing.

On a daily basis we employ a diverse selection of characterization techniques for primarily inspecting the structural and optical properties of synthesized materials, and of the samples obtained from our collaborators.

Over the years our group members have mastered and passed down the art of independently gathering useful data from characterization techniques such as: X-ray diffraction (XRD), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), to name a few.

We have built our own optical setups to carry out a variety of optical measurements such as Raman & Photoluminescence spectroscopy, Optical trapping, Laser Tweezers, Photoluminescence lifetime measurements, Thermometry, Eigenfrequency measurements of microcantilevers etc. 

To get the cutting edge information from our  materials, group members been on visits to highly specialized facilities such as the Naval Research Laboratory, Advanced Light Source and Sandia national laboratories.

To evaluate the properties and behaviour of materials we pay equal attention to modeling in-dept analytical solutions or using software packages such as Comsol, Ansys, DDSCAT, Quantum Espresso etc.

We have developed analytical solutions and corresponding Matlab / Python codes to model 3 dimensional heat transfer in various geometries and electromagnetic profiles within materials due to optical excitation.