Related papers: A direct optical method for the study of grain bou…
Thermal stability of nanocrystalline multilayer thin film is of paramount importance as the applications often involve high temperature. Here we report on the layer instability phenomenon in binary polycrystalline thin film initiating from…
A novel method for the direct measurement of the degree of polarization is described. It is one of the first practical implementations of a coherent quantum measurement, the projection on the singlet state. Our first results demonstrate the…
Polarization is well known for its ability to decompose diffuse and specular reflections. However, the existing decomposition methods only focus on direct reflection and overlook multiple reflections, especially specular inter-reflection.…
A rigorous methodology is developed for computing elastic fields generated by experimentally observed defect structures within grains in a polycrystal that has undergone tensile extension. An example application is made using a near-field…
Grain boundaries dramatically affect the properties of polycrystalline materials because of differences in atomic configuration. To fully understand the relationship between grain boundaries and materials properties, systematic studies of…
Grain boundaries, the two-dimensional (2D) defects between differently oriented crystals, control mechanical and transport properties of materials. Our fundamental understanding of grain boundaries is still incomplete even after nearly a…
A coarsened model for a binary system with limited miscibility of components is proposed; the system is described in terms of structural states in small parts of the material. The material is assumed to have two alternative types of…
The problem of melting a crystal dendrite is modelled as a quasi-steady Stefan problem. By employing the Baiocchi transform, asymptotic results are derived in the limit that the crystal melts completely, extending previous results that hold…
Astronomical polarimetry is a powerful technique that can provide physical information sometimes difficult or impossible to obtain by any other type of observation. Almost every class of binary star can benefit from polarimetric…
In undergraduate optics courses, diffraction gratings are studied extensively, generally within the scalar approximation. When the vector nature of light is taken into account, so-called polarization diffraction gratings have been proposed,…
Jamming is a common feature of out of equilibrium systems showing slow relaxation dynamics. Here we review our efforts in understanding jamming in granular materials using experiments and computer simulations. We first obtain an estimation…
By radiation transfer models with a realistic power spectra of the projected density distributions, we show that the optical properties of grains are poorly constrained by observations of reflection nebulae. The ISM is known to be…
Black materials play a critical role in applications such as image registration, camera calibration, stray light suppression, and visual design. Although many such materials appear similarly dark under diffuse illumination, their…
We present a simple method for controlling the polarisation state of light at the waist of a single-mode optical nanofibre. The method consists of complete polarisation compensation based on imaging scattered light from inherent…
We study effects of finite height and surrounding material on photonic crystal slabs of one- and two-dimensional photonic crystals with a pseudo-spectral method and finite difference time domain simulation methods. The band gap is shown to…
Aligned interstellar grains produce polarized extinction (observed at wavelengths from the far-ultraviolet to the mid-infrared), and polarized thermal emission (observed at far-infrared and submm wavelengths). The grains must be quite…
We describe an apparatus designed for obtaining precise measurements of the growth rates of ice crystals from water vapor over a range of experimental conditions. Our aim is to produce clean, high-quality test crystals in a well controlled…
A densely packed granular system is an example of an out-of-equilibrium system in the jammed state. It has been a longstanding problem to determine whether this class of systems can be described by concepts arising from equilibrium…
We discuss how the diffraction theory of a single translation bounded measure or a family of such measures can be understood within the framework of unitary group representations. This allows us to prove an orthogonality feature of measures…
Optimizing grain boundary characteristics in polycrystalline materials can improve their properties. Many processing methods have been developed for grain boundary manipulation, including the use of intense radiation in certain…