ucsd - AI Weirdness (Page 2)

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By Janelle Shane On July 18, 2014 - 1 min read

This is a nanotorch, which is an ultra-sensitive chemical detector, thanks to its ability to concentrate light. In the intense light fields at the torch’s top, a normally-weak light-based chemical fingerprinting technique (Raman spectroscopy) becomes millions of times stronger. More-sensitive Raman fingerprinting can allow us to detect trace contaminants

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By Janelle Shane On July 16, 2014 - 1 min read

When a nanolaser casts a shadow, the grad student gets 6 more weeks of fabrication. The pillar in the middle is one of the nanolasers our lab makes. It’s supposed to be a single column all by itself, roughly cylindrical with a bit of a funky coke bottle shape,

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By Janelle Shane On July 14, 2014 - 1 min read

Oops. When we’re making nano-devices, chaos is usually bad. I named this spot “The Barrens”. It’s supposed to be a single straight waveguide (basically, a pipe for light) stretching off into infinity. Instead, this spot got scratched partway through the fabrication process, leaving behind a chaotic landscape that

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By Janelle Shane On June 30, 2014 - 1 min read

The cliffs of insanity? Rising an awe-inspiring 1.5 microns above the wave-lashed sea (about 1/100 the thickness of a sheet of printer paper), these cliffs were formed when high-energy plasma ate away a layer of semiconductor. All that was left behind was this island, protected by a glassy

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By Janelle Shane On June 19, 2014 - 1 min read

Like a tiny shiny mountain, this nanolaser and the area around it is coated in a layer of blobby silver. The silver serves as a mirror that keeps the laser light bouncing around inside the laser’s light-amplifying interior, generating more and more copies of itself. A tiny percentage of

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By Janelle Shane On June 09, 2014 - 1 min read

A nanoscale landscape, peopled with little pillars. Each of these would fit easily inside a single cell. They were created out of semiconductor (the same sort that can be made into lasers), when a high-energy plasma ate away everything that wasn’t protected. Each little pillar has a cap on

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By Janelle Shane On June 06, 2014 - 1 min read

Pretty rainbow colors brought to you by the wave nature of light. The phenomenon that made these wild colors out of a thin film of photoresist on silicon is the same phenomenon that’s behind the rainbow colors of soap bubbles and oily puddles. It’s also a more chaotic

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By Janelle Shane On May 31, 2014 - 1 min read

UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering wrote a neat article on my blog - check it out [http://jacobsschoolofengineering.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-art-of-nanolasers.html] !

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By Janelle Shane On May 19, 2014 - 1 min read

A strange landscape with an even stranger sky. This is a microscope view of the edge of a smooth chunk of silicon, coated with a thin clear plasticy layer of photoresist. Just like the colors in a soap bubble, this colorless thin layer produces rainbow colors due to the wave

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By Janelle Shane On May 17, 2014 - 1 min read

A Devil’s Tower-like monument rises above a sea of bubbles. It’s just another day in the life of a nanolaser researcher. The tower is a microscopic laser in the process of being built - here, it’s shown after it was carved out of a flat sheet of

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