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In recent years resonant semiconductor and all-dielectric nanophotonics offered a lot of possibilities for thermally-induced light manipulation at the nanoscale. Owing to high-quality resonant states, such nanostructures allow for efficient…
A simple optical lens plays an important role for exploring the microscopic world in science and technology by refracting light with tailored spatially varying refractive index. Recent advancements in nanotechnology enable novel lenses,…
Transmission of high power laser beams through partially absorbing materials modifies the light propagation via a thermally-induced effect known as thermal lensing. This may cause changes in the beam waist position and degrade the beam…
Localized heating of a gas by intense laser pulses leads to interesting acoustic, hydrodynamic and optical effects with numerous applications in science and technology, including controlled wave guiding and remote atmosphere sensing.…
The action of a nanoscopic spherically symmetric refractive index profile on a focused Gaussian beam may easily be envisaged as the action of a phase-modifying element, i.e. a lens: Rays traversing the inhomogeneous refractive index field…
We describe a novel method for making microbottle-shaped lasers by using a CO$_2$ laser to melt Er:Yb glass onto silica microcapillaries or fibres. This is realised by the fact that the two glasses have different melting points. The CO$_2$…
Ultra-compact, low-loss, fast, and reconfigurable optical components, enabling manipulation of light by light, could open numerous opportunities for controlling light on the nanoscale. Nanostructured all-dielectric metasurfaces have been…
An optical field will undergo coherent diffusion when it is mapped into thermal-motioned atoms, e.g., in a slow or storage light process. As was demonstrated before, such diffusion effect is equivalent to a spatial low-pass filter…
The properties of amorphous solid water at and near the calorimetric glass transition temperature, $T_{g}$, of 136 K have been debated for years. One hypothesis is that water turns into a "true" liquid at $T_{g}$ (i.e., it becomes ergodic)…
Light is an excellent medium for both classical and quantum information transmission due to its speed, manipulability, and abundant degrees of freedom into which to encode information. Recently, space-division multiplexing has gained…
Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes, carrying orbital angular momentum of light, are critical for important applications such as high-capacity optical communications, super-resolution imaging, and multi-dimensional quantum entanglement. Advanced…
Microgels are soft microparticles that often exhibit thermoresponsiveness and feature a transformation at a critical temperature, referred to as the volume phase transition temperature. The question of whether this transformation occurs as…
The manipulation of micro- and nano-objects is of great technological significance to construct new materials, manipulate tiny amounts of liquids in fluidic systems, or detect minute concentrations of analytes. It is commonly approached by…
We describe an optical beam converter for an efficient transformation of Gaussian femtosecond laser beams to single- or double-charge vortex beams showing no spatial or topological charge dispersion. The device achieves a conversion…
Optical phase-change materials are highly promising for emerging applications such as tunable metasurfaces, reconfigurable photonic circuits, and non-von Neumann computing. However, these materials typically require both high melting…
When a surfactant-stabilised oil droplet with an ultralow interfacial tension is trapped in the focus of two laser beams and pulled apart (by moving the laser beams) a configuration of two droplets connected by a thin tether of oil results.…
Liquid crystals (LCs) play a fundamental and significant role in modern technology. Recently, they have also been used in active switching, adaptive optics, and next-generation displays for augmented and virtual reality. This is due to the…
In this article, we report the first observation of nanosecond laser induced transient dual absorption bands, one in the bandgap (TA1) and another in the sub-bandgap (TA2) regions of a-Ge5As30Se65 thin films. Strikingly, these bands are…
We report a technique for encoding both amplitude and phase variations onto a laser beam using a single digital micro-mirror device (DMD). Using this technique, we generate Laguerre-Gaussian and vortex orbital-angular-momentum (OAM) modes,…
Understanding light-matter interaction enables harnessing physical effects to translate into new capabilities realized in modern integrated photonics platforms. Here, we present the design and characterization of optofluidic components in…