PI Institution: North Carolina State University
Starting from the recent seminal work of Popovic, the microwave electronics community has proven that we can extract small but useful amounts of electricity by harvesting the energy of ambient, disorganized microwave energy in the environment. That new but well-established technology uses antennas with micro-sized features, in order to extract energy from microwaves. The goal of this new project is to discover how much can be extracted from higher frequencies of ambient radiation, by using nano-scaled structures tuned to extract energy from terahertz frequencies of radiation. The project will proceed from theoretical modeling and analysis, to design, fabrication and testing of systems designed to extract as much energy as possible from the thermal surface excitation of an optimized polar semiconductor.
Intellectual Merit
Using current theoretical tools, it is difficult to predict what will actually happen as one moves this kind of technology to the nanoscale. For example, it is well known how to calculate the free energy component of chemical materials at room temperatures, as a share of total enthalpy, but a similar decomposition is not available for general sources of electromagnetic radiation. Also, quantum effects come into play at the nanoscale. This project will start from the best available state-of-the-art modeling of what to expect, accounting for quantum effects to some degree; however, the greatest benefit to science will be the opportunity to compare the most interesting theoretical predictions with highly replicable empirical results.
Broader Benefits
If this project should actually result in a useful new source of small-scale electricity for use in portable devices like sensors and small communications nodes, the transformative benefits would be enormous. Benefits are expected in any case to local solid-state spectroscopy and near field microscopy, technologies of growing importance as enablers for nanotechnology. This research will be performed in collaboration with the new NSF-supported site for Research Experiences for Undergraduates at NCSU. Undergraduates will be recruited to work on the project and gain experience in advanced simulation techniques and laboratory measurement procedures.
