JI’s Associate Professor Yaping Dan has been awarded a research grant from the 2013 Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program.
His project title is “Laser-like Highly Collimated Light Sources Based on Nanowire LEDs,” which he described as follows, “A regular light emitting device (LED) that emits a highly collimated light beam like a laser has yet to realize after being pursued for decades. It has turned into a common sense that only lasers can emit highly collimated light beams while regular LEDs cannot. The reason is that a LED is not a spot light source. Different light spots of the light source on the focal plane will propagate in different directions after collimated by the lens, leading to a divergent light beam (upper-left panel). The research group led by Prof. Dan proposes to employ nanowire LEDs to make a breakthrough. The group has successfully fabricated highly uniform vertically standing nanowires at a wafer scale (lower-left panel). Each nanowire device will be capped with a concave mirror by a self-alignment process (lower-right panel). The nanowire LED will emit light from its top end, behaving like an ideal point light source. The light will be highly collimated, propagating downwards after focused by the concave mirror (upper-right panel). The research will lead to not only conceptual innovation but also many practical applications.”
The Shanghai Pujiang Program is jointly sponsored by the Shanghai Human Resource Bureau and Shanghai Science and Technology Commission. Its purpose is to increase the presence of overseas scholars and professionals and to promote technological innovation and entrepreneurship.
