Gerald Harris
MIT Department: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Karl Berggren
Research Supervisors: Dip Joti Paul, Matthew Yeung
Undergraduate Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology
Hometown: Conyers, Georgia
Website: LinkedIn
Biography
Gerald Harris is a third-year Electrical Engineering major with a minor in Material
Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He actively volunteers at various outreach events, such as science fairs and the Atlanta Science Festival. Gerald firmly believes in the power of inclusivity in STEM fields, asserting that everyone can excel with the right opportunity and encouragement. As a researcher, he has been involved in building cosmic ray detector systems. He also volunteers at the Material Science Makerspace at Georgia Tech. At MIT, he works on fabricating an FTIR microscope and characterizing nanoscale devices. Gerald’s interests lie at the intersection of electrical engineering and material science, and he plans to pursue a doctoral degree to contribute to research in materials and devices for energy, detection, and computation. Beyond academia, Gerald enjoys biking, appreciating non-brutalist architecture, and dancing to a good beat.
Abstract
FTIR Microscope for Nanoscale Photocurrent Measurements
Gerald Harris1, Matthew Yeung2, Dip Joti Paul2, Karl Berggren2, Philip Keathley2
1School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
2Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Infrared photodetectors are important for their application in surveillance and night vision. Widely used infrared photon detectors face significant challenges with size, weight, and power (SWaP) because of cryogenic cooling, limited sensitivity, or slow response times. An alternative infrared detection method – InfraRed-Enhanced Electron Emission from Nanoantennas (IREEN) is a promising platform which aims to operate at room temperature with low SWaP and is expected to be scalable with standardized fabrication processes available in commercial foundries.
IREEN in part operates based on an electron emission from the nanoantenna structure over a nanoscale vacuum gap to a collector. The optimal device architecture that improves detectivity for the devices will depend on the dominant mechanism behind this detection mechanism. For this project we will focus on investigating the infrared spectral response of IREEN devices to explore the emission physics.
In this work, we fabricated a custom Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer (FTIR) microscope and investigated the spectral characteristics of IREEN devices. Using this FTIR microscope we collected photocurrent measurements that will be used to inform our device design in this program. The long-term results of this would provide the Navy with a solution to high sensitivity room temperature IR cameras with low SwaP.
