PhD on 2D liquid composites for integrated optoelectronic devices on Si
Length of Award: 4 years from September 2015
Value: Tuition fee, stipend of £13,863, and travel funding of £1,500 (UK and EU students) Tuition fee only (non-EU students).
Supervisors: Dr. Anna Baldycheva and Dr. Monica Craciun
The University of Exeter is a top 10 UK university, and a member of the elite Russell Group of institutions. It was named University of the Year in The Sunday Times University Guide 2013 and is in 8th place in The Sunday Times league table for 2014. Recent capital projects to the value of GBP 350 million across the University ensure a truly world-class research and teaching environment and inspirational location to work and live.
The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Metamaterials (XM2) is hosted by the University of Exeter, and located entirely in the Engineering and Physics buildings on the Streatham Campus. We recruited 18 excellent students in our first year and are admitting another 14-18 PhD students in September 2015.
Project Overview
The PhD student will have the opportunity to do an international level research focused on the design, fabrication and characterization of the graphene liquid crystal (GLC) microfluidic metamaterials as well as of plasmonic structures and devices integrated on Si platform. This project will focus on the development and investigation of the novel class of 2D material based liquid crystal composites and their application in the integrated hybrid micro-electronic and micro-photonic devices and systems on Si platform. GLC materials [Nature Materials 13, 394 (2014)] may become one of the most promising class of hybrid fluid composites for the fabrication of metamaterials and for the realization of on-chip tunable metadevices.
The unique electrical, optical and magnetic properties of GLC materials arise from the combination of the outstanding properties of graphene and the liquid crystal’s fluidic nature and electro-optical characteristics. However, the research studies on the application of optically- and electrically- reconfigurable GLC as hybrid metamaterials are very limited.
In particularly, to the best of our knowledge, the application of GLC composites in passive or active metadevices on the integrated Si platform was not demonstrated in theory or experiment.