Our lab is in Henderson Hall suite 109.

The main hall area:

Aisle 1

Aisle 1 is for general electronic assembling/testing, resistor and capacitor kits, toolbox, hardware kits, solid chemicals, electronic scale, sputter coater for small EO polymer samples as well as scanning electron microscopy (SEM) samples, tube furnace for ZnO nanowire and carbon nanotube growth, a propane torch station for glass work, and two Edward 603A vacuum systems with 12" bell jars. One of the vacuum system is a DC sputter coater and the other is 6-hearth electron-beam evaporator for dielectrics (ITO, ZnO) and metals (Cr, Al). The e-beam evaporator are sometimes reconfigured into a thermal evaporator for physical vapor deposition (PVD) of organics. Also in the area is a Perkin Elmer spectrophotometer, and a poling station for EO polymers. The drawers on the right hand side has electronic components, bolts and nuts, thermal couples and temperature controllers from Omega, power cords, dc and rf probes, probe manipulators, various rf adaptors and connectors. Most of tools can be found in the toolbox and on magnets on the wall at the end of the aisle. Other tools are scattered all over the lab.

Aisle 2

Aisle 2 has vacuum ovens, fiber cleaving and fusion splicing, storage cabinets for fiber optic components, cables, optical bench components, spools of fiber, etc., an ESEC precision dicing saw, and a polishing machine with 12" polishing rotor.

Aisle 3

Aisle 3 has fluorescent sensor testing, CO₂ laser for fiber fusion, polymer chemical vapor deposition, electronic testing, rf testing, lightwave component analyzer (vector network analyzer with optical interfaces, 130 MHz to 20 GHz), a probe station, and the power supply for Quantronix femto-second amplifier, shelves and storage cabinets for misc electronic and optical  components, small test equipment, three spectro-physics dye lasers, two high resolution optical time-domain refloctometers, and  laser diodes, photodiodes, and misc bits and pieces.

The THz room

The THz room has a 5 feet by 10 feet optical table with a Coherent Micra-5 femto-second laser, a Quantronix Integra-C regenerative amplifier, and a KrF excimer laser (248 nm). There are three experiment set-ups on the optical table. The first one is the terahertz time-domain spectroscopy system. We also do terahertz imaging by doing a x-y scan of the test sample on a computer controlled motion stage with a 10" by 12" platform. The second setup is for writing fiber Bragg gratings with the excimer laser and phase masks. The third setup is for two-photon polymerization microfabrication using the output from Micra 5 and a set of high precision motion stages (top of the line from Newport, with 5 nm resolution and 2" travel).  Also in the room is a small optical table with a PTI nitrogen laser (337 nm) and we use this laser to write Bragg gratings in plastic optical fiber. A drawer chest for various fiber optical cables (single mode, multi-mode, polarization maintaining, etc) with various connectors (PC, APC, LC, FC, ST, SC, biconic, SMA, etc.), and various fiber connector adaptors.  

The micro-fabrication room

The micro-fabrication room has a 150 square feet modular cleanroom with a fumehood/wet chemical bench, a Karl Suss MJB-3 contact mask aligner for photolithography and photobleaching, a oxygen plasma etcher, a Dektak IIA profilometer, a Nikon microscope equipped with digital XYZ readout and a digital camera, a UV light box, and convection ovens. In the dressing area there is an explosion-proof refrigerator for flammable chemicals (such as photoresist) and an ordinary refrigerator for non-flammable chemicals. Also in the room but outside the cleanroom are a Wyko NT-2000 optical profiler, an oxidation furnace, DI water system, and acid and flammable chemical storage cabinets. Cleanroom supplies such as gloves, air nest, clean room tissues and swabs, glass ware, sringes, needles, sringer filters, test tubes, vials are on the wire shelf behind the Wyko.

The optical waveguide testing room

The optical waveguide test room has a 3 feet by 5 feet optical table with a waveguide test station for optical resonators and fiber Bragg gratings. The test station consists of 3 waveguide/fiber alignment stages, a microscope with video camera, a Santec tunable laser (1500-1600 nm), a JDS broadband light source, an HP optical spectrum analyzer, and HP optical power meter (with separate detector heads and modules for visible and infrared wavelengths, and optical return loss (back reflection)). A separate waveguide test station is on a 2 feet by 3 feet optical table, with Newport Ultralign fiber stages with electrictive actuators, HP optical power meter, a solid state 1.3 um laser (300 mW, CW) and a 1.5 um fiber laser (up to 5 W, CW), function generators, fast oscilloscope (8 GHz), a waveguide/fiber mode profiler (infrared camera based), and a Mitutoyo long working distance microscope with video camera on a motorized slide. Another table is dedicated for thin film optical waveguide loss measurement with liquid out-coupling technique. A card catalog style cabinet for various optomechanical components (posts, post mounts, clamps, lens mounts, prism mounts, linear stages, rotary stages, brackets, microscope objectives, etc..). Most our equipment user manuals are on the two bookshelves mounted on the wall of this room, with the exception of the manuals of equipment used in the terahertz system. Those manuals are on the white plastic bookshelf in the THz room.

The lab is very well equipped. Dr. Chen is an experimentalist and he loves to collect and fix equipment. He spends many hours everyday in the lab, working with and helping student research assistants with their projects.

Optical sources from ultraviolet to far infrared

• UV lamps with liquid filled light guide

• UV LEDs (365, 390 and 402 nm)

• KrF (248 nm) excimer laser (multi-gas design and can run ArF (193 nm) as well)

• Nitrogen lasers (337 nm, one 1 mJ and the other 100 uJ)

• Diode pumped frequency doubled solid state lasers (473 nm and 532 nm)

• Several He-Ne lasers (633 nm and 1.15 um)

• Spectro-Physics dye lasers (tunable over 400 nm to 1 um, depending on the dye and the pump wavelength)

• Ti:sapphire femto-second laser (wavelength tunable from 750 nm to 850 nm, pulse length tunable from ~10 fs to ~1 ps.)

• Ti:sapphire regenerative amplifier (790 nm, 1 mJ pulse energy)

• High power diode laser (830nm, 2 W)

• 980 pump lasers

• Spectro-Physics Quanta-Ray YAG laser (1.06 um, 40 mJ,  8 ns pulsed)

• Diode pumped solid state lasers (1.06 um 30 mW CW free space, and 1.3 um 300 mW CW fiber output)

• High power fiber laser (1.5 um, 5W CW)

• CO₂ laser (10.6 um, 20 W CW)

• Several optical power meters and detectors that cover ultraviolet to far infrared.

Optical testing

• Several Nikon, Mitutoyo, Olympus and Leica microscopes. Most of them are equipped with digital or video cameras. One with digital readout with 0.1 um resolution and 300 mm travel on XYZ axes.

• Two high resolution OTDRs. One of them is dual wavelength (850 nm and 1300 nm).

• HP 8703 optical component analyser (130 MHz to 20 GHz)

• HP 8509A optical polarization analyzer (fiber coupled)

• Thorlabs polarimeter (free space and fiber coupled)

• Perkin Elmer Lambda 9 spectrophotometer (190 nm to 3.1 um)

• Ocean Optics USB4000 spectrometer (200-850 nm, solid state, CCD based)

• Optical broadband sources (Er ASE)

• Erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA)

• Variable optical attenuators (free space, single mode fiber, and multimode fiber)

• Narrow band tunable fiber optic filters

• HP optical polarization controller

• Several HP optical power meters and a variety of plug-in modules and Si, Ge, and InGaAs detector heads

• York electronic fiber cleaver

• Siecor fiber fusion splicer

• Abbe refractometers

• Several optical choppers

• Many silicon, germanium, InGaAs photodetectors and thermal laser power meters

Electronic testing

• Karl Suss PM-3 probe station

• High frequency (up to 40 GHz) probes and calibration standards

• HP vector network analyzer (part of the 8703 optical component analyser, up to 20 GHz)

• Several signal and function generators

• HP spectrum analyzer (1 kHz to 1.5 GHz)

• Frequency counters

• Several HP and Tektronics oscillascopes

• Stanford Research 850, 830 DSP digital lock-in amplifiers and a 610 analog lock-in amplifier

• Stanford Research box-car averager

• Microwave and rf power meters (to 26 GHz)

• Keithley picoammeter

• Color video monitors (LCDs and CRT)

• Sony color video printer

• Many HP DC power supplies up to 200 A

• Multi-channel data and temperature loggers

• Two ILX Lightwave laser diode drivers

• Several digital and analog multimeters

• LCR meter

• Capacitance meter

Microfabrication

• Karl Suss MJB-3 mask aligner

• Dektak IIA surface profiler

• Plasma-Preen microwave plasma etcher

• Edwards 603A DC sputter

• Edwards 603A electron-beam evaporator

• Tuber furnaces (3" and 2")

• Precision dicing saw

• March PX 500 plasma etcher (to be installed)

• Perkin Elmer Ultralign projection mask aligner (to be installed)

• Three spin coaters

• Fume hood with stainless steel wet bench with DI water and two built-in spin coaters

• Vacuum ovens and covection ovens

• Box furnace (up to 1200 ºC)

A dozen of cabinets and shelves full of lenses, mirrors, polarizers, waveplates, gratings, optical filters, optical mounts, motion stages, photodetectors, laser diodes, various optical fibers, couplers, fiber collimators, resistor and capacitor kits, screw kits, IC kits (74LS series), switches, connectors, electrical cables from BNC to ribbon, hose and vacuum fittings, thermocouples, temperature controllers, vacuum gauges (thermocouple, Pirani, and ion gauges), dicing/polishing supplies, glassware, and all kinds of bits and pieces that comes handy when you need them.

Software tools

• RSoft Beamprop, a optical waveguide simulation software using beam propagation method

• OptiWave OptiFDTD, a finite-differential time domain software for optical waveguide and photonic crystal devices

• FIMMWAVE, a powerful mode solver for optical waveguides of high index contract and very thin layers

• Zeland IE3D, an electromagnetic simulator

• Comsol Multiphysics,  a versatile software package to do a large varieties of finite element method simulations.

• AutoCAD, we usually use AutoCAD to design photomasks

• LinkCAD, a software to convert between DXF and GDSII files for photomask and e-beam lithography

• LabView, used extensively to run experiments and measurements

• Multisim, circuit simulation and schematic capture

• Ultiboard, printed circuit board design and auto routing

• Mathematica

• MathCAD

• MatLab

• Igor Pro, a versatile software to plot and analyze data