NANOHMICS INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N211-021
NANOHMICS INC — SBIR Phase I award from Department of Defense.
- Amount
- $146,496
- Agency
- Department of Defense · Navy
- Program / Phase
- SBIR · Phase I
- Topic
- N211-021
- Solicitation
- 21.1
- NAICS
- —
- Place of performance
- TX
- Period
- 2021-07-20 → 2022-01-18
Description
State-of-the-art Infrared Scene Projection Systems (IRSP) are using Light Emitting Diode (LED) arrays to generate virtual reality scenes emulating real operating environments for a variety of military and industrial detection systems, including infrared missile seekers, search and track systems, and thermal imagers. LEDs made with Type II InAs/GaSb strained super lattice heterostructures have demonstrated excellent performance in the mid-wave infrared. However the light extraction efficiency of devices is still limited to a few percent due to total internal reflection at the high-index substrate-air interface. This proposal seeks to leverage the field-enhancement characteristics of plasmonic metasurfaces to improve the out coupling efficiency of IR LEDs. Our approach will investigate LED active regions embedded between a metal ground plane and sub-wavelength grating structures that efficiently funnel out photons otherwise trapped as bound modes within the cavity.