Because plasmonic modes have no cut-off, we are able to demonstrate downscaling

When light illuminates a rough metallic surface, hotspots can appear, where the light is concentrated on the nanometre scale, producing an intense electromagnetic field. This phenomenon, called the surface enhancement effect, has a broad range of potential applications, such as the detection of weak chemical signals. Hotspots are believed to be associated with localized electromagnetic modes, caused by the randomness of the surface texture. Probing the electromagnetic field of the hotspots would offer much insight towards uncovering the mechanism generating the enhancement; however, it requires a spatial resolution of 1-2 nm, which has been a long-standing challenge in optics. The resolution of an optical microscope is limited to about half the wavelength of the incident light, approximately 200-300 nm. Although current state-of-the-art techniques, including near-field scanning optical microscopy, electron energy-loss spectroscopy, cathode luminescence imaging and two-photon photoemission imaging have subwavelength resolution, they either introduce a non-negligible amount of perturbation, complicating interpretation of the data, or operate only in a vacuum. As a result, after more than 30 years since the discovery of the surface enhancement effect, how the local field is distributed remains unknown. Here we present a technique that uses Brownian motion of single molecules to probe the local field. It enables two-dimensional imaging of the fluorescence enhancement profile of single hotspots on the surfaces of aluminium thin films and silver nanoparticle clusters, with accuracy down to 1.2 nm. Strong fluorescence enhancements, up to 54 and 136 times respectively, are observed in those two systems. This strong enhancement indicates that the local field, which decays exponentially from the peak of a hotspot, dominates the fluorescence enhancement profile.

ABSTRACT:We report an invisibility carpet cloak device, which is capable of making an object undetectable by visible light. The cloak is designed using quasi conformal mapping and is fabricated in a silicon nitride waveguide on a specially developed nano-porous silicon oxide substrate with a very low refractive index. The spatial index variation is realized by etching holes of various sizes in the nitride layer at deep subwavelength scale creating a local effective medium index. The fabricated device demonstrates wideband invisibility throughout the visible spectrum with low loss. This silicon nitride on low index substrate can also be a general scheme for implementation of transformation optical devices at visible frequency. KEYWORDS:Optical metamaterials, invisibility cloak, optical transformation Invisibility cloaks, a family of optical illusion devices that route electromagnetic (EM) waves around an object so that the existence of the object does not perturb light propagation, are still in their infancy. Artificially engineered materials with specific EM properties, known as metamaterials [1,2], have been used to control the propagation of EM waves, and have recently 2 been applied to cloaking through transformation optics [3][4][5][6][7][8]. The invariance of Maxwell's equations under optical coordinate transformation allows the space around the object to be reshaped such that the light can propagate in the desired way. Such transformations usually require EM properties with extreme values that are only achievable in metallic metamaterials, and have been experimentally demonstrated for cloaking in microwave frequencies [9,10]. Due to the significant metallic loss at optical frequencies, the implementation of such cloaks for visible light has been difficult. Recently another innovative strategy was developed based on exploiting uniaxial crystals [11,12]. These devices have demonstrated cloaking in visible frequencies for a certain polarization of light based on intrinsic anisotropy in the crystals. As an alternative, conformal mapping, where an inverse transformation of the electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability leads to a spatially variable refractive index profile [13], can be applied to isotropic dielectric metamaterials. While 3D conformal mapping leads to anisotropic index profiles [14], a 2D quasi conformal mapping (QCM) can be employed to minimize anisotropy. The 2D QCM is the basis for the carpet cloak [15], where the object is hidden under a reflective layer (the carpet). To achieve cloaking, the raised protrusion (the bump) created in the reflective layer is mapped to a flat plane and the resulting 2D index profile forms a carpet cloak device. In contrast to resonant optical structures [16,17], QCM carpet cloak provides a broadband loss-less design and may be invariably extended in the third direction with some limitations [18], experimentally demonstrated to operate for a range of viewing angles [19]. The relatively modest materials requirement from QCM enabled the implementation of the...

Nanoporous silicon (Si) networks with controllable porosity and thickness are fabricated by a simple and scalable electrochemical process, and then released from Si wafers and transferred to flexible and conductive substrates. These nanoporous Si networks serve as high performance Li-ion battery electrodes, with an initial discharge capacity of 2570 mA h g(-1), above 1000 mA h g(-1) after 200 cycles without any electrolyte additives.

Current methods for evaluating solar cell efficiencies cannot be applied to low-dimensional structures where phenomena from the realm of near-field optics prevail. We present a theoretical approach to analyze solar cell performance by allowing rigorous electromagnetic calculations of the emission rate using the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. Our approach shows the direct quantification of the voltage, current, and efficiency of low-dimensional solar cells. This approach is demonstrated by calculating the voltage and the efficiency of a GaAs slab solar cell for thicknesses from several microns down to a few nanometers. This example highlights the ability of the proposed approach to capture the role of optical near-field effects in solar cell performance.