Related papers: A biological tissue-inspired tunable photonic flui…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
The unique optical properties of two-dimensional layered materials are attractive for achieving increased functionality in integrated photonics. Owing to the van der Waals nature, these materials are ideal for integrating with nanoscale…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
The origin of rigidity in disordered materials is an outstanding open problem in statistical physics. Previously, a class of 2D cellular models has been shown to undergo a rigidity transition controlled by a mechanical parameter that…
Flexible microelectronics has shown tremendous promise in a broad spectrum of applications, especially those that cannot be addressed by conventional microelectronics in rigid materials and constructions1-3. These unconventional yet…
Here, we present a mechanism for tailoring the photonic band structure of a quarter-wave stack without changing its physical periods by embedding conductive sheets. Graphene is utilized and studied as a realistic, two-dimensional conductive…
We calculate the photonic band structure at normal incidence of highly deformable, self-assembling systems - cholesteric elastomers subjected to external stress. Cholesterics display brilliant reflection and lasing owing to gaps in their…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
Metamaterials are arrangement of basic building blocks that repeat in space, time, or both. These material systems serve as an excellent platform for controlling waves, such as engineering wavenumber band gaps, flat bands, and…
Phononic crystals (PnCs) are artificially patterned media exhibiting bands of allowed and forbidden zones for phonons. Many emerging applications of PnCs from solid-state simulators to quantum memories could benefit from the on-demand…
The exploration of binary valley degree of freedom in topological photonic systems has inspired many intriguing optical phenomena such as photonic Hall effect, robust delay lines, and perfect out-coupling refraction. In this work, we…
Motivated by the recent emergence of a new class of anisotropic 2D materials, we examine their electromagnetic modes and demonstrate that a broad class of the materials can host highly directional hyperbolic plasmons. Their propagation…
Programmable integrated photonics has emerged as a powerful platform for implementing diverse optical functions on a single chip through software-driven reconfiguration. At the core of these processors, photonic waveguide meshes enable…
We report an experimental study of the elastic properties of a two-dimensional (2D) colloidal crystal subjected to light-induced substrate potentials. In agreement with recent theoretical predictions [H.H. von Gruenberg and J. Baumgartl,…
Light modulation is an essential operation in photonics and optoelectronics. With existing and emerging technologies increasingly demanding compact, efficient, fast and broadband optical modulators, high-performance light modulation…
Tunable photonic elements at the surface of an optical fiber with piezoelectric core are proposed and analyzed theoretically. These elements are based on whispering gallery modes whose propagation along the fiber is fully controlled by…
Material band structure is key foundation for various modern technologies, but it was regarded as a space-time invariant feature. Acoustic metamaterials show extraordinary properties for processing elastic waves, but conventional…
In contrast to designing nanophotonic devices by tuning a handful of device parameters, we have developed a computational method which utilizes the full parameter space to design linear nanophotonic devices. We show that our method may…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
Soft particles suspended in fluids flowing through microchannels are often encountered in biological flows such as cells in vessels. They can deform under flow or when subject to mechanical stresses as they interact with themselves.…