Related papers: Point defects in IBS coating for very low loss mir…
We report on the development of low-loss ion-beam-sputtered (IBS) mid-infrared coatings for hybrid supermirrors. Two highly reflective designs were realized: HR1, a 4-period a-Si/SiO$_2$ DBR with an Al$_2$O$_3$ bonding layer, and HR2, a…
Sensing and manipulating targets hidden under scattering media are universal problems that take place in applications ranging from deep-tissue optical imaging to laser surgery. A major issue in these applications is the shallow light…
Micromechanical transducers such as cantilevers for AFM often rely on optical readout methods that require illumination of a specific region of the microstructure. Here we explore and exploit the diffraction effects that have been…
Using a custom-built scanning system, we generated maps of birefringence on reflection at $\lambda=1064$~nm from single-crystal GaAs/Al$_{0.92}$Ga$_{0.08}$As Bragg reflectors (henceforth ``AlGaAs coatings''). Ten coatings were bonded to…
Interference-fit joints are typically adopted to produce permanent assemblies among mechanical parts. The resulting contact pressure is generally used for element fixing or to allow load transmission. Nevertheless, some special designs take…
Silver (Ag) mirrors for astronomical telescopes consist of multiple metallic and dielectric thin films. Furthermore, the topmost surface of such Ag mirrors needs to be covered by a protection coating. While the protection coating is often…
A phenomenological model was developed to explain quantitatively, without free parameters, the production of primary defects in silicon after particle irradiation, the kinetics of their evolution toward equilibrium and their influence on…
We study by numerical simulations the scattering of $s$-polarized light from a rough dielectric film deposited on the planar surface of a semi-infinite perfect conductor. The dielectric film is allowed to be either active or passive,…
This study describes both experimentally and theoretically an important hitherto undiscovered feature of the scattering of micron_sized spherical objects when illuminated with highly focused circularly polarized light. This is a regime of…
A bent-crystal mirror has been used to focus an atomic helium beam. The mirror is made from gold deposited onto a mica substrate to form a thin film (~5000 {\AA} thick) of large single crystal domains (domain size ~4000 {\AA} ). The mica…
Spectral cameras with integrated thin-film Fabry-P\'erot filters have become increasingly important in many applications. These applications often require the detection of spectral features at specific wavelengths or to quantify small…
Optical cavities to filter squeezed light for quantum noise reduction require optics with very low scattering losses. We report on measured light scattering from two super-polished fused silica optics before and after applying…
When an X-ray area detector based on a single crystalline material, for instance, a state of the art hybrid pixel detector, is illuminated from a point source by monochromatic radiation, a pattern of lines appears which overlays the…
We study the effect of defects in the Mott insulator phase of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice on the dynamics of resonant excitations. Defects, which can either be empty sites in a Mott insulator state with one atom per site or a…
Plastic scintillators are widely used as particle detectors in many fields, mainly, medicine, particle physics and astrophysics. Traditionally, they are coupled to a photo-multplier (PMT) but now silicon photo-multipliers (SiPM) are…
Miniature concave hollows, made by wet etching silicon through a circular mask, can be used as mirror substrates for building optical micro-cavities on a chip. In this paper we investigate how ICP polishing improves both shape and roughness…
Coherent backscattering is a multiple scattering interference effect which enhances the diffuse reflection off a disordered sample in the backward direction. Classically, the enhanced intensity is twice the average background under well…
Optical multilayer coatings of high-reflective mirrors significantly determine the properties of Fabry-Perot resonators. Thermal (Brownian) noise in these coatings produce excess phase noise which can seriously degrade the sensitivity of…
We present the results of mechanical characterizations of many different high-quality optical coatings made of ion-beam-sputtered titania-doped tantala and silica, developed originally for interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. Our…
A series of thin layers of alternating refractive index is known to make a good optical mirror over certain bands of frequency. Such a device - often termed the Bragg reflector - is usually introduced to students within the first years of…