Advanced Optical Metrology for Sustainability

Catalog description

MAE 6340 is an introductory course of advanced optical metrology and its applications in sustainability. Innovative solutions to emerging sustainability challenges of energy crisis, water scarcity, and carbon emission require mechanistic understanding of fundamental conversion and transport processes of energy carriers and essential species in materials and devices. Advanced optical microscopy and spectroscopy have become ubiquitous tools to enable in-situ characterization with unprecedented details, from detecting single-molecule behaviors in carbon reduction to probing femtosecond-scale electron-photon interaction during energy conversion. Topics of the course cover (1) fundamentals of wave propagation and light-matter interactions with both classical and quantum treatments, (2) working principles of various optical microscopy and spectroscopy metrology tools, including wide-field, confocal, fluorescence, near-field, super-resolution, and pump-probe techniques, and (3) applications of these optical metrology tools in materials and devices associated with clean energy production, water harvesting, and carbon reduction.