Our inaugural grant recipient, Arthur Montazeri, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is pursuing the capture and storage of infrared energy. His project has led to collaboration with UC-Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), in Berkeley California. Here are some of his accomplishments in the past year.

• His research was approved as a US Department of Energy-funded User Proposal at the Nanofabrication Facility of the Molecular Foundry at LBNL, to fabricate devices for the trapping of infrared light. The trapped light energy will then be converted into an electrical output. This work was patented and published last year.
• This project is active at the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center which is an Industry/University Cooperative. The project was showcased at an industry conference in April, 2015 where it was received with interest from electronics manufacturers.
• Collaboration has commenced with the Advanced Light Source (ALS) division of the Berkeley Synchrotron where electrons are accelerated to 99.999996% of the speed of light! The infrared light portion of a wide array of energy particles generated is used to test their devices.
• An application for these infrared devices in medical imaging as well as artificial photosynthesis is being pursued. Filings for a provisional patent of this platform have been made.

Some of the results of this work were recently presented at the International Surface Plasmon Photonics Conference in Jerusalem, Israel June 2015. The Tyler Lewis Clean Energy Research Foundation was acknowledged for its generous support. We at the foundation thank Arthur for his time to update us on the progress of this exciting project.