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Plasmonic nanoparticles resonantly couple to and confine light below the diffraction limit. This mechanism has enabled a modern renaissance in optical materials, with potential applications ranging from sensing and circuitry to renewable…
Gold nanorods have unique optical properties, which make them promising candidates for building nano-structured materials using a "bottom-up" strategy. We formulate stable bulk materials with anisotropic optical properties by inserting gold…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
Active optics is defined as the control of the shape and the alignment of the components of an optical system at low temporal frequencies. For modern large telescopes with flexible monolithic or segmented primary mirrors and also flexible…
We propose the existence, via analytical derivations, novel phenomenologies, and first-principles-based simulations, of a new class of materials that are not only spontaneously optically active, but also for which the sense of rotation can…
We present a method to realize active optical tips for use in near-field optics that can operate at room temperature. A metal-coated optical tip is covered with a thin polymer layer stained with CdSe nanocrystals or nanorods at low density.…
The key component of nanoplasmonics is metals. For a long time, gold and silver have been the metals of choice for constructing plasmonic nanodevices because of their excellent optical properties. However, these metals possess a common…
In this Letter we show how a single beam optical trap offers the means for three-dimensional manipulation of semiconductor nanorods in solution. Furthermore rotation of the direction of the electric field provides control over the…
Electrospinning in controlled nitrogen atmosphere is developed for the realization of active polymer nanofibers. Fibers electrospun under controlled atmospheric conditions are found to be smoother and more uniform than samples realized by…
Self-organized collective behaviour of active units is inspiring new designs of artificial swarms of micron-sized objects. However, active control at the nanoscale remains elusive. We have accurately solved the collective optofluidic…
Within the framework of independent particle approximation, the optical activity tensor of solids is formulated as from different contributions: the magnetic dipole, electric quadrupole, and band dispersion terms. The first two terms have…
Selective spatial control of chemical reactions at the level of individual nanostructures remains a significant challenge. We introduce a light-activated system that combines plasmonic gold nanorods with a poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)…
Within the framework of mode-coupling theory, we present a simple model for describing dense assemblies of active (self-propelled) spherical colloidal particles. For isotropic suspensions, we demonstrate that the glass transition is shifted…
Electronic excitations in metallic nanoparticles in the optical regime that have been of great importance in surface enhanced spectroscopy and emerging applications of molecular plasmonics, due to control and confinement of electromagnetic…
This study investigates the dynamic control of third-order nonlinear optical absorption properties of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) dispersed in nematic liquid crystals (LC). By leveraging the reconfigurable nature of liquid crystals under…
Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…
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…
We introduce a novel approach for all-optical trapping and manipulation of absorbing aerosol particles based on a photophoretic force. We demonstrate experimentally, in open air, the robust three-dimensional guiding of agglomerates of…
Basing our arguments on the theory of active liquid crystals, we demonstrate both analytically and numerically, that the activity can induce an effective free energy which enhances ordering in extensile systems of active rods and in…
We describe a soft matter system of self-organized oblate micelles and plasmonic gold nanorods that exhibit a negative orientational order parameter. Because of anisotropic surface anchoring interactions, colloidal gold nanorods tend to…