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J. Todd Hastings Reese Terry Professor of Electrical Engineering Professor of Physics (joint appointment) Director, Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering Contact: todd.hastings@uky.edu |
The Hastings Research Group studies nanoscale materials and devices, particularly magnetic and photonic systems, along with their associated nanomanufacturing technologies. Current efforts are focused on applications in optical sensing, imaging, materials characterization, renewable energy, and unconventional computing.
March 14, 2025
Conventional cameras benefit from an alternative RGBW arrays by responding with higher sensitivity in low light and and low color error. Finding the correct metafilters to enable simultaneous focusing and filtering is examined by new researcher Alex J. Thuringer along with Dr. J. Todd Hastings and Dr. Mansoor A. Sultan in the article, Metasurface color filter arrays with a high efficiency and low color error published in the January 20, 2025 issue of Applied Optics. The full article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1364/AO.541031
February 15, 2023
A collaboration between the Hastings and De Long groups at U.K. with Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne National Laboratories recently discovered a new way to probe the magnetic order of nanostructures using X-ray orbital- angular momentum (OAM). This work, entitled "Antiferromagnetic real-space configuration probed by dichroism in scattered x-ray beams with orbital angular momentum," was recently published in Physical Review B. "Twisted” X-ray beams carrying OAM hold great promise for imaging and probing materials at the nanoscale. Here, asymmetric scattering in OAM beams allowed us to distinguish degenerate antiferromagnetic ground states in an array of nanoscale magnets. This phenomenon demonstrates the potential for OAM beams to probe matter in ways that are not possible with current x-ray techniques. The full paper can be found at https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.107.L060407.
September 28, 2022
Collaborators at the University of Bergen (Norway), led by Professor Martin Greve, recently published the details of a new optical sensor which couples metal nanoparticles with optical waveguides. The sensor relies on the localized surface plasmon resonances of metal nanoparticles which are commonly used for biochemical interaction analyses. The sensor shows markedly improved figures of merit for sensitivity and limit-of-detection, and the paper provides theoretical guidance for optimizing such sensors for specific applications. The full article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.470017
