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J. Todd Hastings Reese Terry Professor of Electrical Engineering Director, Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering Contact: todd.hastings@uky.edu |
The Hastings Research Group seeks novel ways to increase the resolution, accuracy, and throughput of nanofabrication and nanomanufacturing techniques with a particular emphasis on photonics applications for sensing, imaging, and materials characterization. Collaborations have expanded the groups' investigations to renewable energy, data storage, communications, and computing.
March 15, 2021
Postdoc Justin Woods and former postdoc Xiaoqian Chen's work, "Switchable X-Ray Orbital Angular Momentum from an Artificial Spin Ice," just appeared in Physical Review Letters. The paper was also highlighted in Physics Magazine in a Viewpoint article entitled "Switching the Twist in X Rays with Magnets." The research was conducted by a collabortive team from U.K.'s Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics departments along with Lawrence Berkeley, Argonne, and Brookhaven National Laboratories. So called “twisted” X-ray beams carry orbital angular momentum (OAM) and hold great promise for imaging and probing materials at the nanoscale. In this work, we showed that a patterned array of nanoscale magnets, an artificial spin ice (ASI), can impart OAM to X-ray beams and that the beams can be switched on and off with temperature and magnetic field. The research opens the possibility of using ASIs as reconfigurable X-ray optics, and switchable X-ray OAM beams could provide new tools for studying magnetic materials.
January 25, 2021
U.K. graduate students Fatih Balli and Mansoor Sultan just published their work on "flat optics" in Nanophotonics. Their paper, "An Ultrabroadband 3D Achromatic Metalens," describes lenses 50 times thinner than a human hair. The lenses image with light ranging from blue (450 nm) to the short-wave infrared (1700 nm). The compact size, light weight, and mass manufacturabilty of metalenses make them ideal for mobile and airborne imaging. The broadband capabilities of this lens are particularly well suited to emerging visible-to-short wave infrared camera technology.
January 8, 2021
Graduate students Mansoor Sultan and Fatih Balli, along with professors Lau and Hastings, recently published their work describing metasurfaces that can simultaneously focus and filter light. These novel nanostructured optics may find application in imaging, spectroscopy, communications, or optical trapping. The work appears in Optics Letters (https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.410080) and was supported by the National Science Foundation and Intel Corp.
