AIRO- 26 December 2020: Egyptian scientist Elham Fadaly and her team at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands won the Physics World 2020 Breakthrough of the Year for creating a silicon-based material with a direct band gap to emit light that will be used for transferring communication data, the Physics World magazine announced on December 17, 2020.
The team described the silicon-based material is “the Holy Grail of the optoelectronics,” the magazine said.
“The research is based on studying how to emit light from the silicon-based material which is used to form electronic chips, in a way that speeds up the process of transmitting data with the speed of light,” she told “90 P.M.” talk show on Channel 1 on Friday.
Fadaly is the Physics PhD Candidate at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and was a researcher in the Kavli Institute of NanoScience at Delft University of Technology from September 2015 - January 2017. She was a Master's Student in the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience at Chalmers University of Technology for a year from October 2014 to August 2015.
Her team’s research was published in April 2020 in Nature magazine. “We demonstrate that, by controlling the composition of the hexagonal SiGe alloy, the emission wavelength can be continuously tuned over a broad range, while preserving the direct bandgap. Our experimental findings are in excellent quantitative agreement with ab initio theory. Hexagonal SiGe embodies an ideal material system in which to combine electronic and optoelectronic functionalities on a single chip, opening the way towards integrated device concepts and information-processing technologies,” the research abstract said.
Sun, Dec. 27, 2020
