I am a microdevices engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. My technical specialization is in the area of semiconductor lasers, specifically mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers and long wavelength diode lasers. I also have substantial experience in software engineering, particularly with MATLAB, C++, and Python. In my spare time, I am pursuing an MBA degree at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
News
28 Aug 2011
A couple people have asked for the video of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Lander I showed during my invited tutotrial at the MIRTHE Summer Workshop. It's available on youtube, or you can just watch it here.
26 Aug 2011
I got a personal profile set up on the JPL website. See for yourself.
21 Aug 2011
I am now posting my PhD thesis New Quantum Cascade Laser Architectures online for the world to see. It's in PDF form right now, but I will work on converting it to HTML soon.
20 Aug 2011
Quite the break I took in keeping my website updated! Two-and-a-half years is too long!
26 Jan 2009
NJN recently filmed a report on our k-space laser. Here's the youtube clip.
23 Dec 2008
News of the k-space paper spread fast around the interent today. It got written up in an article titled "Princeton Researchers Discover New Type of Laser," and I'll be the first to admit the title could be a bit of a stretch,
but the press is still cool. It even made the front page of digg and the top of the digg science page;
don't ask me though what Keira Knightley has to do with anything.
14 Dec 2008
Our high k-space lasing paper officially came out in Nature Photonics today. You can find the preprint here, or get a copy emailed to you through my publications page.
02 Dec 2008
CLEO deadline time again. This year I'm submitting on negative differential resistance and charge instabilities in short injector quantum cascade lasers. Here's the abstract.
22 Nov 2008
Our patent application on intersubband excited state transitions was recently published.
14 Nov 2008
Our paper, "High k-Space Lasing in a Dual Wavelength Quantum Cascade Laser" (K.J. Franz, S. Menzel, et al.) has just been accepted in Nature Photonics! It should be coming out within the next month or so. Here's a preprint.
30 Sept 2008
We presented our new work on short injector quantum cascade lasers at the International Quantum Cascade Laser School & Workshop in Switzerland. Here are the talk slides.
21 July 2008
I was recently interviewed for an article on explosives detection using quantum cascade lasers that appeared in Defense News.
20 July 2008
Started a new website for Franz Family genealogy. Check it out at www.franz-family.org.
03 July 2008
Our work on short injector QC lasers was invited for presentation at the Quantum Cascade Laser School & Workshop in Monte Verita, Switzerland. I'll post the abstract soon.
26 June 2008
I'll be presenting the II-VI work
at the MIOMD conference in Freiburg, Germany. Here's the abstract.
02 April 2008
The II-VI work ran on optics.org too. Check out the article here.
01 April 2008
Our II-VI work got picked up by Compound Semiconductor. Here's the website, but there's a free registration to view the page. You can read the article here.
26 Mar 2008
Our Applied Physics Letters paper on II-VI electroluminescence has just been published. Check it out here.
25 Mar 2008
We submitted a couple abstracts to ICPS in Rio. They're posted
on the publications page.
07 Feb 2008
I started a new section on quantum cascade laser physics. I plan to put several write-ups in this section; some of the material might end up in my thesis. Right now, I'm starting with one: a derivation of the QCL figure of merit.