This award to Daniel Weitekamp at the California Institute of Technology and Frank Grunthaner at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is supported by the Advanced Materials Program in Chemistry and the Solid State Chemistry Program in the Division of Materials Research. The collaborative program will deal with the development of advanced optical nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques and their application to the characterization of defects in III-V epitaxially grown compound semiconductors in microelectronic devices. Specifically, the application of time-sequenced optical NMR and Larmor beat detection to optical nuclear polarization methods will be developed and applied to semiconductor devices. This new technique will non-destructively detect semiconductor defects at the part-per-billion level, far exceeding the sensitivity of existing methods. Modeling studies based on a particle-in-a-box model of quantum confined wave functions will complement experimental measurements. This new characterization technique will provide an unprecedented microscopic view of the structure and function of semiconductor quantum well optoelectronic devices, answering long-standing fundamental questions. The high accuracy of the information will reduce trial and error, accelerating the large national effort to realize high performance electronic and photonic devices, particularly those based on quantum-confined structures.
