Related papers: Light-assisted, templated self assembly using a ph…
Self-assembly in the laboratory can now yield `information-rich' nanostructures in which each component is of a distinct type and has a defined spatial position. Ensuring the thermodynamic stability of such structures requires…
Patchy colloids are promising candidates for building blocks in directed self-assembly. To be successful the surface patterns need to both be simple enough to be synthesized, while feature-rich enough to cause the colloids to self-assemble…
Liquid crystals (LCs) form an extremely rich range of self-assembled topological structures with artificially or naturally created topological defects. Some of the main applications of LCs are various optical and photonic devices, where…
We theoretically investigate equilibrium behaviors and photothermal effects of a flexible plasmonic metamaterial composed of aramid nanofibers and gold nanoparticles. The fiber matrix is considered as an external field to reconfigure a…
Ultracold atom-traps on a chip enhances the practical application of atom traps in quantum information processing, sensing, and metrology. Plasmon mediated near-field optical potentials are promising for trapping atoms. The combination of…
This paper reports on conceptual and experimental work towards the realization of plasmonic surface traps for cold atoms. The trapping mechanism is based on the combination of a repulsive and an attractive potential generated by evanescent…
We studied numerically and experimentally the effects of structural disorder on the performance of ultraviolet photonic crystal slab lasers. Optical gain selectively amplifies the high-quality modes of the passive system. For these modes,…
Studies of nanoparticle-based optical matter have only considered spherical constituents. Yet nanoparticles with other shapes are expected to have different local electromagnetic field distributions and therefore interactions with neighbors…
It is widely accepted that self-assembling building blocks is one of the promising ways for engineering new materials. Recent years reveal substantial progress in fabricating colloidal particles, polymer blocks and supramolecular aggregates…
Self-assembly is a process which is ubiquitous in natural, especially biological systems. It occurs when groups of relatively simple components spontaneously combine to form more complex structures. While such systems have inspired a large…
The paper discusses the prerequisites for the creation, technical solutions and implementation of an automated control system for the assembly of a small spacecraft. Both the hardware and software implementation of the system that provides…
The study of metallic nanoparticles has a long tradition in linear and nonlinear optics [1], with current emphasis on the ultrafast dynamics, size, shape and collective effects in their optical response [2-6]. Nanoparticles also represent…
We prove that by successively combining subassemblies, we can achieve sublinear construction times for "staged" assembly of micro-scale objects from a large number of tiny particles, for vast classes of shapes; this is a significant advance…
We demonstrate a novel artificial optical material, a photonic hyper-crystal, which combines the most interesting features of hyperbolic metamaterials and photonic crystals. Similar to hyperbolic metamaterials, photonic hyper-crystals…
Physical properties of composite materials can be pre-engineered by controlling their structure and composition at the mesoscale. Yet, approaches for achieving this are limited and rarely scalable. We introduce a new breed of self-assembled…
We investigate gain-assisted optical forces on dye-enriched silver nanoshell in the quasi-static limit by means of a theoretical/numerical approach. We demonstrate the onset of nonlinear optical trapping of these resonant nanostructures in…
One emerging approach for the fabrication of complex architectures on the nanoscale is to utilize particles customized to intrinsically self-assemble into a desired structure. Inverse methods of statistical mechanics have proven…
Self-assembly is traditionally described as the process through which an initially disordered system relaxes towards an equilibrium ordered phase only driven by local interactions between its building blocks. However, This definition is too…
The optical binding of many particles has great potential to achieve the wide-area formation of a "crystal" of small materials. Unlike conventional optical binding, where the whole assembly of targeted particles is irradiated with light, if…
Laser-driven acceleration holds great promise for significantly improving accelerating gradient. However, scaling the conventional process of structure-based acceleration in vacuum down to optical wavelengths requires a substantially…