Domenico Pacifici
Assistant Professor of Engineering:
Engineering
Phone: +1 401 863 2637
Domenico_Pacifici@brown.edu
We are the research group of Professor Domenico Pacifici. We lead research projects aimed at the exploitation of photons in nanoengineered materials and devices for novel information, sensing and energy-harvesting solutions.
Biography
Domenico Pacifici recently joined Brown as an assistant professor in the Division of Engineering. Professor Pacifici received his M.Sc. (2000) and Ph.D. (2004) in Physics, both summa cum laude, from the University of Catania in Italy, where he studied the optical, structural and electrical properties of silicon quantum dots and their interaction with rare-earth ions for a silicon-based Microphotonics. His work has been recognized by several citations and invited talks at international conferences.
In 2004 he received an award from STMicroelectronics, a global leader in electronics and semiconductor manufacturing, for the best PhD thesis performed in collaboration with industry. Prior to joining Brown, he spent four years as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology.
Professor Pacifici and his research group are currently leading research projects aimed at the exploitation of photons in nano-engineered materials for information, sensing and energy-harvesting applications.
Interests
We live in a society based on massive information exchange and energy consumption. Indeed, the typical data transfer rate in optical fiber networks is of the order of tens of terabits per second (Tb/s). On the other hand, the worldwide energy consumption is currently estimated to be greater than 14 terawatts (TW), averaged annually, and is expected to exceed 30 TW by 2050.
In order to meet the ever growing worldwide data and energy demands, new approaches and paradigm-shifting strategies are needed to overcome the intrinsic limitation of current technologies.
Our group intends to understand the fundamental physical laws and explore alternative approaches in the following research areas: Energy harvesting, Optical communication, and Biochemical sensing.
Energy
Solar energy is an accessible, abundant, and sustainable form of energy with average usable insolation estimated to be several times our current worldwide needs.
In conventional photovoltaic devices, the photogenerated charge carriers are collected in the same direction as light is absorbed. Therefore, active layers must be optically thick to enable full light absorption, and at the same time have high crystallinity and purity to allow for efficient photocarrier collection. Solar cell design and material synthesis considerations are strongly dictated by this simple optical thickness requirement, which increases the cost of the photovoltaic module.
Reducing the absorber layer thickness by several orders of magnitude (from 10-100 μm down to 10-100 nm) could significantly expand the range and quality of absorber materials that are suitable for photovoltaic devices.
Our goal is to demonstrate efficient solar cells that show enhanced energy-harvesting properties.
Among other solutions, we propose to employ the high confinement properties of surface plasmon polaritons at metal-dielectric interfaces to increase the optical absorption and carrier extraction in thin photovoltaic materials.
This work will help circumvent the cost/efficiency trade-off of conventional photovoltaic technologies, leading to efficient and cost-effective solar cells.
Information
Photonic networks with sophisticated functions have the potential to solve problems such as crosstalk, power dissipation, and speed limitations that microelectronics circuits are soon expected to face, and at the same time offer the opportunity for low-cost and high-volume fast communication, new computing schemes, and data-storage solutions.
We propose to employ nanoscale plasmonic structures to guide, concentrate and modulate light on the surface of a monolithic integrated-circuit.
Our goal is to develop the basic building blocks for photonic circuits and networks that operate at the nanoscale.
The proposed work will attempt to integrate plasmonic, electronic and photonic devices on the same chip, exploiting the strengths of each technology.
This research activity will enable unprecedented guiding and routing capabilities of optical signals in compact devices, with 100 times smaller area than conventional dielectric waveguides, component footprint less than 45 nm, and switch energies in the order of femtojoules to attojoules, comparable to state-of-the-art microelectronic transistors.
Sensing
Propagating surface plasmon polaritons and localized surface plasmons can be used to enhance detection of chemical or biological analytes by monitoring binding events of molecules to chemically-functionalized continuous metal films.
Typical implementations of plasmonic sensor devices rely on non-scalable approaches, which make use of bulky and expensive prisms and optical components to evanescently couple an incident laser beam and generate a propagating surface plasmon, and monitor a variation in refractive index via a change in the incoupling angle.
Our goal is to integrate thousands of biochemical sensors in a single, compact, lab-on-a-chip device.
The proposed approach will allow quantitative and qualitative detection of multiple analyte species with an estimated sensitivity to refractive index change better than 1 part per million, and provide a powerful tool for protein-DNA binding studies.
Degrees
PhD in Physics
Curriculum Vitae
