The Brown & White

Light bulbs as strong as lasers and windows with glass three-times as powerful as normal material are just some of the projects that Lehigh researchers will work on after receiving two large state grants.

The Franklin Technology Development Authority granted Lehigh $500,000 in funds for the Nanophotonics Technology research program and $900,000 for the P.A. Materials Research Science and Engineering Center on March 14.

Susan Disidore, contract and grant specialist, said the Ben Franklin Technology Development Authority has funded Lehigh for at least 10 years but the university receives funding from many different sources.

"Our research expenditures have approximately doubled in the last six or seven years," Disidore said. "In 2000 it was about $25 million a year, and as of last year it was about $50 million."

Thomas Koch, director of the center for optical technologies and professor of electrical and computer engineering, said there are three distinct projects within the general area of nanophotonics.

The nanophotonics for green energy involves creating light sources and turning light into electricity.

The second project, nanophotonics for biomedical diagnostics and sensors, uses nanotechnology to create light sources with unconventional properties.

"Light bulbs put out incoherent light, but they're not really bright the way a laser is," Koch said. "You'd like to have something that's got the properties of a laser, that provides this incredibly intense focused and directed energy, but you want to have the incoherence of a light bulb."

This development would create the ability to send light through semi-transparent tissues, which would be useful in medical fields such as dentistry.

"This is much less invasive than x-rays, so you wouldn't have to worry about your exposure and it would be very localized," Koch said.

He said people who have diabetes could also benefit from this technology.

"Instead of being poked for blood samples, if you could have something non-invasively sitting on your skin that constantly monitored your sugar level, it would be very nice," Koch said.

The third project, silicon nanophotonics, involves moving or generating light into a variety of frequencies, Koch said. The light would be encoded with information, he said.

Companies are interested in this kind of chip because it forms the backbone for Internet communications, he said

Lehigh is working with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology and Stanford University to see if a laser can be made from silicon, Koch said.

Lehigh will also receive $900,000 for the PA Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

Martin Harmer, director of the center for advanced materials and nanotechnology, said this grant was given as a compliment to an award from the National Science Foundation.

"Lehigh has a very unique facility," Harmer said. "We have one of the largest and most sophisticated electron microscopes in the world, so there's strong expertise here."

Harmer, who specializes in interfacial kinetic engineering, said all materials are granular, and the area where they're joined is a layer only a few atoms thick.

One such material is armored glass. Harmer said the ability to control the speed of atoms in such materials could create glass that is two to three times as strong as current armor.

"This would protect our soldiers from impacts, so it's a very current concern," Harmer said. "NASA's very interested in these same materials. It's very nice when you get different agencies interested in different applications."

He said in the next generation of crew launch vehicles, NASA needs windows in its space vehicles and these windows need to have impact-resistant strength because they get subjected to unpredictable force.

Harmer said the quality of the center's microscopes will hopefully allow the researchers to make the discoveries necessary to improve the material.

"There are just a few microscopes in the country that have these aberrration corrected lenses," Harmer said. "We actually have two of them."

The center for advanced materials and nanotechnology engages in a lot of joint research projects with companies, Harmer said.

"We've invested at least $10 million in the facility here in electron microscopy," he said.

He said companies don't have the access to funds to support that kind of equipment.

"We assist those companies in the region by developing facilities that we know they will benefit from," Harmer said. "That's one of the major reasons why the state want to invest in what we have at Lehigh."