In recent years, plasmonics and metamaterials have seen an explosion of novel ideas and device designs. However, transforming these concepts into practical devices requires a significant amount of effort. The constituent materials in these devices play a crucial role in realizing useful and efficient devices. Similar to the way silicon shaped the nanoelectronics field, efforts toward finding the best set of materials for plasmonic and metamaterial devices could revolutionize the field of nanophotonics. As a potential solution, alternative plasmonic materials have recently gained significant attention. Metals, despite being essential components of plasmonic and metamaterial devices, pose many technological challenges toward the realization of practical devices—primarily due to their high optical loss, integration and fabrication limitations. Hence, searching for an alternative to metals is vital to the success of future nanophotonic devices. In this talk, I will provide a brief survey of recent developments in the pursuit of better plasmonic materials, and discuss several classes of materials including doped semiconductor oxides and ceramics as potential alternatives to metals that provide low intrinsic loss, tunability and compatibility with standard semiconductor fabrication processes.
Biography
Alexandra Boltasseva is an assistant professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University, and an adjunct associate professor at Technical University of Denmark (DTU). She received her PhD in electrical engineering at DTU in 2004. Boltasseva specializes in nanophotonics, nanofabrication, plasmonics and metamaterials. She received the IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award, the MIT Technology Review Top Young Innovator (TR35) Award that "honors 35 innovators under 35 each year whose work promises to change the world," the Purdue College of Engineering Early Career Research Award, the Young Researcher Award in Advanced Optical Technologies from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and the Young Elite-Researcher Award from the Danish Council for Independent Research. She is topical editor for Optics Letters and the Journal of Optics and guest editor for Advances in OptoElectronics, a senior member of the OSA, member of the IEEE, SPIE and MRS. Boltasseva has co-authored three invited book chapters and 65 research papers in refereed journals. She has an h-index of 22 (ISI Web of Science)/26 (Google Scholar) with a total number of citations above 1600. Boltasseva has been featured as an invited speaker at 59 international conferences and leading research centers.

Biology is soft and curvilinear; silicon technology is rigid and planar. Electronic systems that eliminate this profound mismatch in physical properties will create new opportunities for devices that can integrate intimately with biological tissues and/or exploit biologically inspired designs. Recent work establishes a set of materials, mechanics concepts and manufacturing approaches for such a technology. This talk describes the key ideas through various examples, ranging from thin, elastic monitoring devices that wrap the heart, brain and skin, to digital cameras that adopt layouts inspired by ocular systems found in mammals and arthropods.
Biography
John A. Rogers obtained BA and BS degrees in chemistry and in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989. From MIT, he received SM degrees in physics and in chemistry in 1992 and a PhD in physical chemistry in 1995. From 1995 to 1997, Rogers was a junior fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows. He joined Bell Laboratories as a member of the technical staff in the Condensed Matter Physics Research Department in 1997 and served as director of this department from the end of 2000 to 2002. Rogers is currently Swanlund Chair Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a primary appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He serves as director of the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory.
Rogers&’ research includes fundamental and applied aspects of materials and patterning techniques for unusual electronic and photonic devices, with an emphasis on bio-integrated and bio-inspired systems. He has published nearly 400 papers and is inventor on over 80 patents, more than 50 of which are licensed or in active use. Rogers is a Fellow of the MRS, IEEE, APS, and AAAS, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His research has been recognized with many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009 and the Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2011.

The Innovation in Materials Characterization Award honors an outstanding advance in materials characterization that notably increases knowledge of the structure, composition, in situ behavior under outside stimulus, electronic behavior, or other characterization feature of materials.
Raman scattering has been recognized to be a powerful tool for the characterization of molecular level structure in polymeric materials since the 1960s. However, there were very few real-world applications due to the severe limitation imposed by background fluorescence. Multiple approaches for fluorescence rejection were tried, including temporal rejection, quenching and photo bleaching among others, without significant success. Since the fluorescence process has a threshold energy related to the excited states which are emitting, one approach to minimizing fluorscence was to reduce the energy of the incident laser photons below that threshold, which would be in the red to near-infrared region of the spectrum. The immediate problem was how to detect the scattered photons since they were of too low an energy to use photomultipliers. The answer was to use detectors available in the 1-2 micron region and compensate for the poor noise figure of the detector with a multiplexing instrument such as an interferometer. The performance of an FT-Raman was excellent and allowed the investigation of a wide variety of materials. It clearly opened up the field of Raman scattering to materials research in a significant way.
Biography
Bruce Chase received his BA degree from Williams College in 1970 and his PhD in physical chemistry from Princeton University in 1975. He then joined E.I. DuPont de Nemours as a research chemist in the Spectroscopy Division of the Central Research Department. Chase retired from DuPont in 2009 as a DuPont Fellow and chair of the DuPont Fellows Forum. He is now a research professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Delaware and the chief technical officer of Pair Technologies LLC.
Chase's primary area of research is in vibrational spectroscopy, FT-IR and Raman techniques and applications to structure/property/process relationships in polymers. In collaboration with Tomas Hirschfeld (deceased), he developed an FT-Raman spectrometer that demonstrated the utility of near-infrared excitation and proceeded to collaborate with John Rabolt on the applications to polymeric materials.
Chase was the 1989 winner of the Williams-Wright Award and the 1990 EAS New York Section Gold Medal Awardee. He received the 1994 SSP Award from the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh and is co-winner of the 1994 Bunsen-Kirchhoff Prize from the German Chemical Society. He received the 1998 Bomem-Michelson Award in March of 1998 and received the ACS Analytical Division Award in Spectrochemical Analysis in November 1999. In 2002, Chase received the Anachem Award and in 2005, the EAS Award for Analytical Chemistry. In 2007, he was recognized with the Hasler Award.

The Innovation in Materials Characterization Award honors an outstanding advance in materials characterization that notably increases knowledge of the structure, composition, in situ behavior under outside stimulus, electronic behavior, or other characterization feature of materials.
Historically, science drives technology, but occasionally the reciprocal happens where technology drives science, as was the case with the development of the cw Nd YAG laser that led to the dawn of FT-Raman spectroscopy. This important spectroscopic technique has been deployed in thousands of laboratories worldwide and forms the basis of a number of commercially available instruments. A cursory review of the literature over the last 25 years reveals that the FT-Raman technique has had pervasive impact in application areas ranging from materials, to forensics, art and archaeology, biology, disease diagnosis (Alzheimer&’s, cancer, etc.) and pharmaceuticals with thousands of peer-reviewed papers appearing in the literature.
A decade ago, the declassification of focal plane arrays (FPA) by the military ushered in a new spectroscopic technique: Planar Array IR (PA-IR) spectroscopy. Ultrafast (<10 msec), portable and capable of dual-beam operation, PA-IR promises to revolutionize the characterization of dynamics in materials and is another example of technology driving science well into the 21st century.
Biography
John F. Rabolt is currently the Karl W. and Renate Boer Professor and Founding-Chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Delaware where he also holds a position as professor of biomedical engineering. Before joining the University of Delaware in 1996 as chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Rabolt was a research staff member (1977-1996) at the IBM Almaden Research Center where he served as co-director of the NSF Center on Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies (CPIMA), a Stanford/IBM/University of California, Davis Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. His research interests are in the area of polymer deformation and orientation, electrospinning, organic thin films, IR/Raman spectroscopy and biomolecular materials for tissue engineering. Rabolt received the 2008 New York Society of Applied Spectroscopy&’s Gold Medal. He has received the 2005 Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award, the Bomem-Michelson Award in Molecular Spectroscopy in 2000, the 1993 Ellis Lippincott Award in Vibrational Spectroscopy, the 1992 Louis A. Strait Award in Applied Spectroscopy, the 1990 Williams-Wright Award in Molecular Spectroscopy and the 1985 Coblentz Award. In addition to serving as chair of three Gordon Conferences (Organic Thin Films-1996; Polymers [West]-1990; and Vibrational Spectrocopy-1990), Rabolt is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and also served as an associate editor of the ACS Journal Macromolecules from 1992 to 2001. He served (1997-2003) as a member of the Gordon Research Conference&’s Scheduling and Selection Committee and was a recent member of NASA&’s Microgravity Materials Science Advisory Committee. Rabolt has co-authored more than 215 peer-reviewed publications, one book and 10 patents.