DoD-HBCU/MSI Awards $760k for new AFM-THz-SNOM at UNT Physics:

 

The Department of Defense awarded our interdisciplinarity team $760k to acquire a new Atomic Force Microscope, combined with Scattering Near-Field Terahertz Microscopy and Conductive Probe Microscopy. The Instrument will be housed in the Physics building in the Laboratory of the lead PI, Jens Neu. Our interdisciplinary team of Co PI’s Usha Philipose, Yuzhe Xiao, Yuankun Lin, Jingbiao Cui (Physics), Jeffry Kelber (Chemistry), and Richard Zhang and Tae-Youl Choi (Mech.Eng) will leverage this instrument for state-of-the-art research and education. The educational effort will be support by Physics Lecturer Rebekah Purvis.

The new AFM-THz-SNOM will strengthen our research and lead to exciting cross-disciplinary collaborations. We will leverage the joint expertise of Engineers, Chemists, and Physicists to push the research at UNT towards the national top tier (R1) level. Providing exciting new opportunities for research related to the Department of Defenses Mission. The opportunity to work with exciting state of the art instrumentation will strengthen our Minority serving mission, providing our students with hands-on experience on the forefront of science; forming the STEM workforce of the 21st century.

Welcom Shreeya Rane

We are welcoming our new postdoc to our group, Shreeya Rane. Shreeya received her Ph.D. from Mahindra University in India. She has extensive experitse in THz spectroscopy, design and characterization of metamaterials, and clean room fabrication. She contributed to nearly two dozent scientific publications and that will just be the beginning. Welcome to UNT. 

 

Welcome Meghna and Ensieh

We are welcoming two new Photons to our group; Meghna and Ensieh. Meghna is an undergraduate who comes to UNT for her NSF-REM summer research internship. She will be working on our Petroleum research grant. 

Ensieh is shared custody with Melanie Ecker (BioMedEng). Ensieh will be working on polymer chemistry and physics. 

Congrats Mari for Receiving the Eagles to the Moon NASA scholarship.

 

Congratulations to Mari for scoring one of two competitive NASA scholarships for UNT STEM undergraduates. Mari’s proposed research on THz spectroscopy on the Moon convinced the selection committee and we are proud of your outstanding ideas! Congrats!

 

Congratulations to Kenny for receiving the Zhibing Hu scholarship!

 

Kenny was awarded the Zhibing Hu scholarship; This competitive scholarship is awarded by the College of Science to outstanding students. The scholarship comes with a $1,000 cash award to her. Congrats on scoring this grant! 

First Light :) 

 

We got our spectrometer up and running!

 

The first THz pulses were measured this Friday (03/08/2024). Some more optimization lead to the signal on the right side. Much stronger, and basically good enough for spectroscopy. Now the fun part begins; getting the signal even stronger and adding the optical pump to it! 

 

Burning Air :) 

 

Our first Amplifier has arrived! 100 fs pulses with 7 mJ energy. When focused into air, a Plasma is ignited. The kind-of Smiley face is highly non-linear physics combined with the non-trivial imaging properties of an OAPM. 

 

Next step is to get the rest of the spectrometer aligned and then hopefully THz pulses soon. 

New Group Logo

Kenny blessed us with a new logo for our group. We are now the Ultrafast and THz Spectroscopy Laboratory at the University of North Texas. 

The American Chemical Society – Petroleum Research Found, selected our idea for funding.

Every oil deposit is associated with petroleum gasses (APG). These APG are often too sparse for commercial exploitation making them an unwanted by-product of oil extraction. The simplest way to handle APG is to flare it, which accounts for about 1 % of the world CO2 production. We will explore novel materials, especially metal-organic frameworks (MOF), to capture APG instead of flaring it. This research will understand the basic physics of gas-MOF interaction. This insight can then be leveraged to improve APG capturing and might help to reduce the environmental harm of flaring. 

If you are interested in Chemical Physics, please feel free to contact us. 

Congratulations to Liam Daly for receiving the Outstanding Poster Award from the Texas Chapter of the American Physical Society. 

Liam's poster presented his work on designing and building a reflection THz Time domain spectroscopy system to study semimetals. Liam’s research strives to understand the basic low energy physics of these novel quantum materials and will foster a better understanding of these materials for future quantum computing applications.

Congratulations to Liam Daly for being awarded the Undergraduate Research Fellowship from the UNT Honors College. 

Every Year UNT selects the most promising undergraduate research proposals for funding. Liam will use Terahertz-Time Domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) to characterize the electro-optical properties of emerging materials. He will study photophysics in Antimonides and THz conductivity in semi-metals. 

Our recent Tutorial on Optical Pump THz Probe Spectroscopy was published in APL Photonics. 

 

And a month before that: We got published in Physical Chemistry Letters. 

Check out both publications in the Publications tab of this homepage. 

Drs. R. Zhang (Mechanical Engineering UNT), T. Choi (Mechanical Engineering UNT), J. Kelber (Chemistry, UNT), A. Krokhin (Physics UNT), and J. Neu (Physics UNT) Receive $4.4M AFOSR grant.

Our team led by Richard Zhang received funding from the Air Force to investigate the propagation of intense light in waveguides. The research will improve our understanding of waveguides, lasing, and stimulated scattering mechanism. This fundamental insight will be used to design acoustic and photonic metamaterials for improved and compact high-power light sources.

Our group will focus on measuring near-fields in waveguides. We will develop a novel technique to detect these waves. So if you are interested in developing novel IR spectroscopy, please feel free to contact me.