Issue 1 (2020)

Optical binding of nanoparticles

Optical binding of nanoparticles

Optical binding is a laser-induced inter-particle force that exists between two or more particles subjected to off-resonant light. It is one of the key tools in optical manipulation of particles. Distinct from the single-particle forces which operate in …

Recent advances in nano-photonic techniques for pharmaceutical drug monitoring with emphasis on Raman spectroscopy

Recent advances in nano-photonic techniques for pharmaceutical drug monitoring with emphasis on Raman spectroscopy

Innovations in Raman spectroscopic techniques provide a potential solution to current problems in pharmaceutical drug monitoring. This review aims to summarize the recent advances in the field. The developments of novel plasmonic nanoparticles continuously …

Optically responsive delivery platforms: from the design considerations to biomedical applications

Optically responsive delivery platforms: from the design considerations to biomedical applications

Drug carriers with intelligent functions are powerful therapeutic and diagnostic platforms in curing various diseases such as malignant neoplasms. These functions include the remote noninvasive activation of drug using physical impacts, e.g. light exposure. …

Beyond dipolar Huygens’ metasurfaces for full-phase coverage and unity transmittance

Beyond dipolar Huygens’ metasurfaces for full-phase coverage and unity transmittance

Metasurfaces made from densely packed resonant wavelength-scale particles enable abrupt modulation of impinging electromagnetic radiation within an ultrathin surface. Combining duality symmetry of particles and rotational symmetry of their arrangement led to …

Bound states in the continuum and strong phase resonances in integrated Gires-Tournois interferometer

Bound states in the continuum and strong phase resonances in integrated Gires-Tournois interferometer

Photonic bound states in the continuum (BICs) are eigenmodes with an infinite lifetime, which coexist with a continuous spectrum of radiating waves. BICs are not only of great theoretical interest but also have a wide range of practical applications, e.g. in …

Improving the efficiency of silicon solar cells using in situ fabricated perovskite quantum dots as luminescence downshifting materials

Improving the efficiency of silicon solar cells using in situ fabricated perovskite quantum dots as luminescence downshifting materials

Luminescence downshifting (LDS) layer integration has been proven to be an efficient way to ameliorate the poor UV-blue spectral response and improve the power conversion efficiency (PCE) for solar cells (SCs). By employing an in situ fabricated CH3NH3PbBr3 …

Structural and optical impacts of AlGaN undershells on coaxial GaInN/GaN multiple-quantum-shells nanowires

Structural and optical impacts of AlGaN undershells on coaxial GaInN/GaN multiple-quantum-shells nanowires

The superior crystalline quality of coaxial GaInN/GaN multiple-quantum shell (MQS) nanowires (NWs) was demonstrated by employing an AlGaN undershell during metal-organic chemical vapor deposition. Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) results …

Surface-plasmon-polariton-driven narrow-linewidth magneto-optics in Ni nanodisk arrays

Surface-plasmon-polariton-driven narrow-linewidth magneto-optics in Ni nanodisk arrays

The field of magnetoplasmonics exploits interactions between light and magnetic matter at the nanoscale for light manipulation and resonant magneto-optics. One of the great challenges of this field is overcoming optical losses in magnetic metals. Here, we …

Broadband multi-wavelength optical sensing based on photothermal effect of 2D MXene films

Broadband multi-wavelength optical sensing based on photothermal effect of 2D MXene films

Two-dimensional (2D) materials were widely used in sensing owing to the tunable physical or chemical properties. For years, optical sensing attracted a massive amount of attention on account of high accuracy, high security, non-invasive measurement, and …

Tailoring the spatial localization of bound state in the continuum in plasmonic-dielectric hybrid system

Tailoring the spatial localization of bound state in the continuum in plasmonic-dielectric hybrid system

Bound states in the continuum (BIC) are considered as an effective means to dramatically elongate the trapping time of light. However, light-matter interaction depends not only on the life-time of an optical mode, but also on its mode volume. Therefore, …

High-speed multiplane structured illumination microscopy of living cells using an image-splitting prism

High-speed multiplane structured illumination microscopy of living cells using an image-splitting prism

Super-resolution structured illumination microscopy (SR-SIM) can be conducted at video-rate acquisition speeds when combined with high-speed spatial light modulators and sCMOS cameras, rendering it particularly suitable for live-cell imaging. If, however, …

Si metasurface half-wave plates demonstrated on a 12-inch CMOS platform

Si metasurface half-wave plates demonstrated on a 12-inch CMOS platform

Half-wave plate (HWP) is one of the key polarization controlling devices in optical systems. The conventional HWPs based on birefringent crystals are inherently bulky and difficult to be monolithically integrated with other optical components. In this work, …

Implementation of on-chip multi-channel focusing wavelength demultiplexer with regularized digital metamaterials

Implementation of on-chip multi-channel focusing wavelength demultiplexer with regularized digital metamaterials

Adiabatic waveguide taper and on-chip wavelength demultiplexer are the key components of photonic integrated circuits. However, these two kinds of devices which were designed by the traditional semi-analytic methods or the brute-force search methods usually …

Imprinted plasmonic measuring nanocylinders for nanoscale volumes of materials

Imprinted plasmonic measuring nanocylinders for nanoscale volumes of materials

Optical measurement of materials at the nanoscale is important for nanotechnology. Various plasmonic nanorulers have been studied for measuring nanoscale distance and orientation of materials, but they lack the capability to contain and measure nanoscale …

Hydrophobin HGFI–based fibre-optic biosensor for detection of antigen–antibody interaction

Hydrophobin HGFI–based fibre-optic biosensor for detection of antigen–antibody interaction

A compact S-tapered fibre biosensor functionalised with class I hydrophobin HGFI found in Grifola frondosa has been proposed for the first time to accrue label-free detection of reaction between goat–anti-rabbit immunoglobulin G (IgG) (GAR, antibody) and …

Enhanced terahertz emission from imprinted halide perovskite nanostructures

Enhanced terahertz emission from imprinted halide perovskite nanostructures

Lead halide perovskites were known to be a prospective family of materials for terahertz (THz) generation. On the other hand, perovskite nanostructures, nanoantennas, and metasurfaces allow tailoring perovskites optical characteristics, resulting in more …

Realization of complex conjugate media using non-PT-symmetric photonic crystals

Realization of complex conjugate media using non-PT-symmetric photonic crystals

Although parity-time (PT)-symmetric systems can exhibit real spectra in the exact PT-symmetry regime, PT-symmetry is actually not a necessary condition for the real spectra. Here, we show that non-PT-symmetric photonic crystals (PCs) carrying Dirac-like cone …

Selective tuning of optical modes in a silicon comb-like photonic crystal cavity

Selective tuning of optical modes in a silicon comb-like photonic crystal cavity

Realizing multiply resonant photonic crystal cavities with large free spectral range is key to achieve integrated devices with highly efficient nonlinear response, such as frequency conversion, four-wave mixing, and parametric oscillation. This task is …

Phase-coupled simultaneous coherent perfect absorption and controllable hot-electron photodetection in Schottky junction metamaterial

Phase-coupled simultaneous coherent perfect absorption and controllable hot-electron photodetection in Schottky junction metamaterial

We report a new type of coherent perfect absorption that is determined by the phase coupling between metaatoms and is referred to as the phase-coupled simultaneous coherent perfect absorption (PC-SCPA) for antisymmetric and symmetric incidences and especially …

Landau quantisation of photonic spin Hall effect in monolayer black phosphorus

Landau quantisation of photonic spin Hall effect in monolayer black phosphorus

The photonic spin Hall effect (PSHE) is a promising candidate for controlling the spin states of photons and exploiting next-generation photonic devices based on spinoptics. Herein, the influences of a perpendicular magnetic field on the PSHE appearing on the …

Near-field spectrum retrieving through non-degenerate coupling emission

Near-field spectrum retrieving through non-degenerate coupling emission

We present a scheme to retrieve the initial spectrum of probe molecules in the near field. This is achieved by replacing conventional glass substrates with a hybrid mode photonics chip to create rich and persistent mode distributions and by observing the …