Related papers: Sapphire optical viewport for high pressure and te…
High precision, high numerical aperture mirrors are desirable for mediating strong atom-light coupling in quantum optics applications and can also serve as important reference surfaces for optical metrology. In this work we demonstrate the…
Near-field thermal emission largely exceed blackbody radiation, owing to spectrally sharp emission in surface polaritons. We turn Casimir-Polder interaction between Cs(7P1/2) and a sapphire interface, into a sensor sharply filtering, at…
We present a new type of compact and all-glass based vapour cell integrating hollow-core photonic crystal fibres. The absence of metals, as in a traditional vacuum chamber and the much more compact geometry allows for fast and homogeneous…
Glass provides mechanical, chemical, and UV protection to solar panels, enabling these devices to withstand weathering for several decades. The increasing demand for solar electricity and the need to reduce anthropogenic carbon emissions…
Controlling the bandgap through local-strain engineering is an exciting avenue for tailoring optoelectronic materials. Two-dimensional crystals are particularly suited for this purpose because they can withstand unprecedented…
Laser cooling of solids currently has a temperature floor of 50 - 100 K. We propose a method that could overcome this using defects, such as diamond color centers, with narrow electronic manifolds and bright optical transitions. It exploits…
This paper presents fabrication, measurement and modelling results for a metal-dielectric-metal metasurface absorber for solar thermal applications. The structure uses amorphous carbon as an inter-layer between thin gold films with the…
Research activities during the last decade have shown the strong potential of photonic devices to greatly simplify ground based and space borne astronomical instruments and to improve their performance. We focus specifically on the…
Interfaces of sapphire are of technological relevance as sapphire is used as a substrate in electronics, lasers, and Josephson junctions for quantum devices. In addition, its surface is potentially useful in catalysis. Using first…
Thermal radiation is the dominant heat loss mechanism for receiver units on a parabolic solar collector plant at high temperatures. Reduction of these losses is traditionally achieved through the use of an optically selective coating on the…
Plasmonic nanoparticles from unconventional materials can improve or even bring some novel functionalities into the disciplines inherently related to plasmonics such as photochemistry or (spectro)electrochemistry. They can, for example,…
Measuring the positions of optical vortices is an essential part in the researches of speckles and adaptive optics. The measurement accuracy is restricted by the performance of optical devices and the properties of optical vortices, such as…
We explore the potential of levitating solids embedded with non-permanent, optically controllable electron spins, which can be used to hyperpolarize their nuclear spin environment with exceptionally long lifetimes. For example,…
We study the acoustic scattering properties of a phononic crystal designed to behave as a gradient index lens in water, both experimentally and theoretically. The gradient index lens is designed using a square lattice of stainless-steel…
Engineered optical absorbers are of substantial interest for applications ranging from stray light reduction to energy conversion. We demonstrate a large-area (centimeter-scale) metamaterial that features near-unity frequency-selective…
High-sensitivity laser spectroscopy is integral to applications like atomic clocks, quantum computers, and chemical sensing. Lowering atomic temperature decreases spectral Doppler broadening and increases transit time across the excitation…
We report on the development of some process capabilities for a polymer-based, multi-layer microelectrofluidic platform, namely: the hot embossing process, metallization on polymer and polymer bonding. Hot embossing experiments were…
The structural evolution with temperature of pure silica (SiO2), sodium-silicate (5Na2O-95SiO2, 10Na2O-90SiO2 and 25Na2O-75SiO2) and albite (15Na2O-15Al2O3-75SiO2) glasses previously densified from hot compression is monitored with a…
We have built and tested a compact, low-cost, but very-high-performance astronomical polarimeter based on a continuously rotating half-wave plate and a high-speed imaging detector. The polarimeter is suitable for small telescopes up to ~1 m…
We present an all-fiber, fully open Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) cavity that is suitable for fluidic measurement applications. Fabrication of the FPI involves the alignment and bonding of three optical fiber sections using either…