The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has awarded a UCF researcher with a 2025 Young Investigator Program (YIP) award. Assistant Professor Leland Nordin, a researcher in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering with a joint appointment in the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL), received a three-year $450,000 grant that will support his research proposal titled “Nanophotonic Mid-wave Infrared Avalanche Photodiodes.”
Nordin’s proposal was selected from more than 150 submissions to the YIP program, which supports early career engineers and scientists who show promise in their research.
“This project builds on what I’ve done for the past 10 years, and it has a broad impact,” Nordin says. “I came to CREOL proposing this idea.”
Nordin’s idea is to enhance light matter in avalanche photodiodes (APDs), which are highly sensitive semiconductor devices that are used to detect very low levels of light. These devices can be found in autonomous vehicles, medical imaging equipment and fiber-optic communications. In the defense industry, APDs are used for communications, mapping and surveillance and are particularly useful in near darkness.
While APDs operate well in the visible and near-infrared wavelengths, Nordin and his team in the Advanced Photonic Devices Lab aim to enhance the capabilities of APDs in the mid-infrared wavelength range. That would make it easier to detect weaker signals of heat and light such as aircraft engines, vehicles or missiles.
The researchers plan to develop infrared detectors that are better than the previous iterations but also steppingstones for future technology.
“We’re doing our first test to make individual detectors, then we’ll scale up to full imagers like cameras,” Nordin says.
The UCF researcher is also a prior recipient of the U.S. Army Research Office Early Career Program Award. His cutting-edge research focuses on next-generation semiconductor materials and devices, covering design, growth, fabrication and characterization. Prior to UCF, Nordin was a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Geballe Lab for Advanced Materials. He earned his doctoral and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.
