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Optics and photonics are key enabling technologies of the 21st century offering great potential for new applications in fields as diverse as medicine, environmental and prognostic structural health monitoring or aeronautics, among others. Many of these applications require the implementation of highly-functional optical sensor networks ideally realized by using cost-efficient materials with tailored...
As new generations of diverse polymer materials become available [1], these are being used for an increasingly diverse variety of applications in optics, thereby allowing the realization of entirely new kinds of optical components and systems. Using manufacturing technologies based on MEMS and microsystems, flexible and stretchable materials may be used for the fabrication of components as diverse...
Direct laser writing (DLW) is a powerful tool toward the development of ultimate three-dimensional (3D) photonic devices. Because of the increasing demand for realising nano-geometries, the diffraction-limited resolution associated with DLW should be overcome to access the nanoscale. To meet this challenge, the concept of 3D nano printing, which is called super-resolution photoinduction-inhibition...
Hybridized nanostructures composed by metals and dielectrics, semiconductors or organics offer new opportunities achieving new functionalities in nonlinear optics, plasmonics, sensing [1-4]. In particular GaAs-AlGaAs-GaAs core-shell-supershell nanowires (NWs) fabricated by self-catalyzed growth on Si substrates were partially covered with gold, thus producing a symmetry breaking in the sample geometry...
Methylammonium lead halide perovskites (MAPbX3, where X = I, Cl, and Br) have come in the spotlight as alternative devices of silicon for next-generation solar cells owing to its extraordinary photovoltaic property, ease of fabrication, and low cost, which has exhibited power conversion efficiencies of up to 20.5% [1]. In addition, perovskites have recently shown the further application in optically-controllable...
Nanowaveguides (NWs) are valuable components for building miniaturized optical devices since they have both nanoscale and microscale dimensions. One can further extend the NW application range by exploiting nonlinear optical effects such as second-harmonic (SH) and sum-frequency (SF) generation. Lithium niobate (LiNbO3) NWs and nanopillars are demonstrated to generate and guide SH [1-4] and SF [5]...
A current challenge and trend in optical sciences is to extend the toolbox generated from experiments with single emitters and single photons towards interfacing photons with a well-defined number of quantum emitters. The resulting complex optical network would enable studies of many-body quantum optical phenomena and could lend itself to quantum simulations. However, common light-matter interfaces...
The negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color center in diamond has been widely investigated for applications spanning from quantum information processing to nanoscale sensing [1]. Central to its utility is its combination of a long-lived electronic spin state with optical initialization and readout. However, the fidelity of room-temperature NV spin readout is limited, due to the low rate of...
Diamond is an exceptional material due to its hardness, high thermal conductivity and transparency from the UV to far IR. Recently it has caught the attention of the scientific community because it is the host of different color centers that can be used for magnetic sensing applications and quantum computing [1]. One of the most promising of these defects is the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center. The electrons...
Exposure of silica glass to focused femtosecond laser radiation produces a variety of structural modifications [1] that are accompanied by a localized change in volume [2, 3]. This volume change can be used to apply displacements in a controlled manner, allowing the generation of intense, localized stress fields [4] whose magnitude, orientation, and shape are easily manipulated through tuning of the...
Authentication of people or objects using physical keys is insecure against secret duplication. Physical unclonable functions (PUF) are special physical keys that are assumed to be unclonable due to the large number of degrees of freedom in their manufacturing [1]. Opaque scattering media, such as white paint and teeth, comprise of millions of nanoparticles in a random arrangement. Under coherent...
Thin films have a large impact on our day to day lives and they find a variety of uses including optical, electrical, or chemical coatings, biomimetics, and various sensors such as pH sensors. Great interest exists in nanoparticles and organic based thin films, due to ease of fabrication, low cost manufacturing, and easy tunability of various properties compared to the inorganic and semiconducting...
Compared to the lithographic realization of nano-structures for microelectronics the demands of today's optical applications on the lithographic fabrication technologies are different. This relates to the lateral shape of the structures as well as to their three dimensional surface profile and, last but not least, the substrates on which the structure need to be realized. On the other hand, optical...
The intrinsic properties of silicon (Si) make it an excellent material for integrated photonics devices with small footprints [1]. To date, most of the reported devices have been based on crystalline silicon (c-Si), but this material suffers from difficult integration with electronic layers due to fabrication constraints. Subsequently, there has been growing interest in alternative forms of Si, such...
Photonic crystals (PhCs) provide light trapping properties that allow people to control the flow of light, and three dimensional PhCs have been proposed as the most efficient light trapping microstructures [1]. The photonic band structure is the most important optical property of a PhC, which describes the dispersion relation for propagating modes within the structure. By measuring the bandstructure...
The chalcogenides represent a unique material platform, capable of providing high-index dielectric, plasmonic, ‘epsilon-near-zero’ (ENZ) or topological insulator properties when the constituent elements are combined in the right proportion. Moreover, they can exhibit reversible, non-volatile structural transitions between solid phases with vastly different electromagnetic properties. We report here...
Whispering-gallery resonators gain more and more interest in optical applications. Their combination of small dimensions, strong light confinement, and high quality factors make them ideally suited for optical frequency conversion. Here, their unique features not only allow operation with very small pump powers, they also allow covering the optical spectrum from the UV up to the mid-IR [1, 2, 3]....
Within Silicon-based waveguide arrays, we demonstrate that sub-λ, below band-gap, nanostructured waveguides can provide a robust control and a fine tuning of the coupling coefficient.
Hybrid organic-inorganic metal halide perovskites represent a remarkable success story in recent materials science applied to optoelectronic devices, thanks to the demonstrations of solution-process solar cells with conversion efficiencies in excess of 20% and very promising LEDs. The peculiarities of perovskites are thought to stem from a blend of organic materials features, like easy fabrication...
Polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) has attracted significant interest in the area of silicon photonics because of its potential for combining good optical transmission, electronic functionality and low fabrication cost, which makes it an attractive material for commercial applications [1]. In addition, it was shown recently that by laser processing of amorphous Si (a-Si) it is possible to obtain very...
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