David McGee
College of New Jersey, NJ·Physics
A surface covered in microscopic ridges can bend light so strongly that it looks brilliantly colored, the same effect that gives butterfly wings their color. Engineered versions of these optical microstructures underpin data storage, displays and compact optics, but they are usually made by shining laser light or an electron beam through a mask onto a photosensitive film — a slow route that is poorly suited to rapid prototyping, and one that leaves the finished structure permanently fixed.
- Fields
Physics
Materials Science
Engineering
- Topics
azopolymer
photomechanical response
surface relief gratings
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Optimize the spatial resolution of a maskless printing system that writes surface microstructures by exploiting the photomechanical response of azopolymer films, in which light-responsive molecules in a flexible polymer deform the surface under polarized light.
- Add an intensity-masking spatial light modulator, a device that patterns a light beam pixel by pixel, so that both optical intensity and polarization can be programmed independently at each point on the film surface.
- Demonstrate one-step laser printing of planar diffractive optics, flat elements that can substitute for bulky refractive lenses, with designs developed in collaboration with a photonics company for emerging applications.
- Test a hybrid lithography route in which nanostructures made by electron beam lithography are replicated in azopolymer films and then optically reconfigured into light-responsive microarchitectures not reachable by either method alone.
More about the research
This project develops an alternative: printing surface microstructures in one step, without a mask, using films that physically deform in response to the direction of light rather than its brightness, so the structures can also be erased and rewritten later.
Why it matters
Mask-based fabrication makes prototyping diffractive optics slow and expensive. A maskless, reversible printing system could put rapid prototyping of light-diffracting surfaces within reach of a much wider range of optical manufacturers, support flat optics that replace bulky lenses in miniaturized photonic devices, and enable light-reconfigurable surfaces useful in color engineering, bioengineering and materials applications that need tunable surface texture.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Judson Ryckman
Clemson University, SC·Engineering·Early-career
Establish the theory of hyperchromatic structural color (HSC), mapping the limits of dynamic color change and how to maximize perceived color shifts in response to targeted stimuli.
Enrique Galvez
Colgate University, NY·Physics
Create novel three-dimensional light patterns containing caustics and vortex singularities by shaping light's polarization and spatial mode, using table-top optics inspired by gravitational lensing and nonlinear oscillators.
Peter T. So
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Design optical compression schemes for differentiable microscopy by training front-end optics and the decompression algorithm together as one neural-network auto-encoder.
The school
College of New Jersey: 2 labs on PI Pages, $3M a year on research.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.