Reginald Penner, Ph.D.

Chancellor's Professor, Chair of the Department of Chemistry

University of California, Irvine

Speech Title:

Electrodeposited Nanophotonics

Abstract:

The detection and emission of light from single crystalline semiconductor nanostructures has been the subject of consideration interest, but polycrystalline nanomaterials have not been investigated in this context, in spite of the fact that the patterning and integration of such materials into devices is dramatically simplified. Here we describe the use of electrodeposited, polycrystalline (pc), cadmium selenide (CdSe) in nanowires and nanogap device structures for photonics. The photodetectors and photon emitters we describe are symmetrical metal-semiconductor- metal (M-S- M) devices prepared either by the evaporation of two gold contacts onto linear arrays of pc-CdSe nanowires prepared using lithographically patterned nanowires electrodeposition (LPNE), or by the electrodeposition of pc-CdSe directly onto gold nanogaps. The properties of these devices for detecting light using photoconductivity, and for generating light by electroluminescence, are described.

Bio:

Reginald Penner is Chancellor’s Professor and Chairman in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). At UCI, he has appointments in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. Professor Penner attended Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota where he obtained B.A. degrees in Chemistry and Biology in 1983. He studied at Texas A&M University beginning in 1983 with Professor Charles R. Martin and he received a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1987. He proceeded to postdoctoral appointments at Stanford University and Caltech working with Professor Nate Lewis, before being appointed at UCI in 1990. Professor Penner is an electrochemist whose research group develops methods based upon electrodeposition for making nanomaterials, such as nanowires, composed of metals and semiconductors. With his students, he has more than 150 research publications to date. He is an A.P. Sloan Fellow, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, an NSF and ONR Young Investigator, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He received the 2009 Faraday Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry of the UK.