Background Electronic devices that use clocks (e.g., smartphones, cars, GPS) require stability of timing reference signals. For wireless and wireline communications applications, short-term clock stability is an important factor, and long-term stability is less of a concern due to periodic synchronizations between the radio nodes. Short-term clock...

Background Ultrathin photonic nanostructures, such as plasmonic and dielectric metamaterials and metasurfaces, have broad applications in electromagnetic wave manipulation, high resolution imaging, and computation. However, conventional production of these metastructures relies on precise nano-machining techniques that are difficult to manufacture...

Background Effective metal forming in the manufacture of commercial products requires that material properties after forming must be maintained or improved, and the metal forming steps must be cost-effective. Achieving both of these conditions is challenging because there is a trade-off between material performance and processing cost. Many current...

Background Generation of ultra-short pulses is in demand for a variety of applications ranging from telecommunication and optical computing to ultrafast science and high-resolution spectroscopy. In spite of the relative maturity of ultra-short pulse generation in the visible and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum, there remains...

Background Polarization detection and manipulation techniques have wide-ranging applications, from glare-reducing glasses, liquid-crystal displays and 3D movies to optical communication, spectrometry, hologram generation, biomedical diagnosis, chemical analysis, and target detection. Conventional methods for polarization detection and manipulation...

Background Hydrogen has been considered one of the most promising alternative fuel due to its high gravimetric energy density, low greenhouse gas emission, and ease of storage. Solar hydrogen production by water splitting in a photo-electrochemical cell (PEC) enables direct conversion of solar to fuel energy. To realize economical solar hydrogen production,...

Batteries operate by polarizing and transferring ions through liquid or molecular solvents. Recent developments have made use of organic cation salts in plastic crystalline states as solvents, in which lithium salts can be dissolved. These lithium salts are known as electrolytes. Unfortunately, they are associated with low conductivity. Other electrolytes...

There is a drive towards more energy efficient structures. Significant energy is used to cool structures, with an estimated 20-50% of heat absorption occurring from sunlight radiation through windows. Removing cooling loads from windows translates to a total estimated cost of almost $15 billion per year. A small fraction of these windows encompass energy-savings...

Carbon nanotubes (CNT) can be manufactured into thin films for a variety of applications such as filtration and construction. To work effectively in these applications, large area films are necessary. Unfortunately, standard approaches to CNT manufacture are only able to produce small area materials through a complex, expensive process which requires...

Very-large-scale-integration (VLSI) is a process of creating massive integrated circuits which enables design of all integrated circuit (IC) components onto a single chip. Thousands of transistors are combined onto a single chip, necessitating highly efficient data scanning in and out of each circuit. Typically the scan-in and scan-out operations are...