UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering major Jessy Gonzalez explains his summer research project during a poster session sponsored by the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships (CSEP).

Concept illustration depicting the trap-assisted Auger-Meitner process at a calcium substitutional impurity (blue) in a gallium nitride crystal lattice (green and silver spheres). An incoming electron (red) gets trapped in a localized state (purple), and its energy is transferred to another electron. Illustration by Fangzhou Zhao.

Computer science assistant professor Misha Sra. Photograph by Lilli McKinney

An image of the newly developed transmitter assembly. The small, brownish chip on the left is the electronic integrated circuit (EIC), and the larger, black-and-gold chip on the right is the photonic integrated circuit (PIC). The long structure on the left side of the PIC is the modulator, which converts the electrical signal into an optical one. Light gets coupled into and out of the chip through the fibers on the right side of the PIC. Everything is mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB), with gold wire bonds connecting the chips. Data flows from left to right, where the incoming electrical signal gets amplified by the EIC, converted to an optical signal by the PIC, and sent out via fiber to its destination.

Materials PhD students Tanay Tak (left) and Bailey Rhodes, 2023 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellows