Integrated optical phased arrays can be used for beam shaping and steering with a small footprint, lightweight, high mechanical stability, low price, and high-yield, benefiting from the mature CMOS-compatible fabrication. This paper reviews the development of integrated optical phased arrays in recent years. The principles, building blocks, and configurations of integrated optical phased arrays for beam forming and steering are presented. Various material platforms can be used to build integrated optical phased arrays, e.g., silicon photonics platforms, III/V platforms, and III–V/silicon hybrid platforms. Integrated optical phased arrays can be implemented in the visible, near-infrared, and mid-infrared spectral ranges. The main performance parameters, such as field of view, beamwidth, sidelobe suppression, modulation speed, power consumption, scalability, and so on, are discussed in detail. Some of the typical applications of integrated optical phased arrays, such as free-space communication, light detection and ranging, imaging, and biological sensing, are shown, with future perspectives provided at the end.

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The mycotoxin ochratoxin A (OTA) is a common contaminant of various plant-derived foods and feeds. However, methods for complete decontamination remain to be established. Recently, biological approaches for mycotoxin removal using various species of yeast have been explored. In the present study, we investigated the efficacy of OTA degradation by the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica under various conditions, altering yeast concentration, temperature, pH, and concentration of OTA in order to determine the optimal requirements of this species. At a yeast concentration of 108 cells/ml, the degradation rate was higher than that observed at any other concentration and, after 24 h, the OTA concentration was reduced to almost half of the initial level introduced to the culture. Further, Y. lipolytica cultured at 28 °C showed the highest level of OTA degradation. Similarly, the culture performed optimally at a pH of 4. The initial concentration of OTA also affected the ability of the yeast to degrade OTA, with the level of degradation being the highest when the initial OTA concentration was 0.1 μg/ml. Moreover, we also tested the toxicity of the OTA biodegradation products using HepG2 cells to determine the physiological applicability of this yeast species in the food industry and observed that these products were notably less toxic than non-degraded OTA. Y. lipolytica effectively reduced natural decay incidence of grapes, and had no negative effect to the storage quality of grape fruits. Taken together, these data suggest that Y. lipolytica could be a viable OTA contamination prevention/treatment option and additional research concerning its commercial use is warranted.

As an indispensable complement to an integer vortex beam, the fractional vortex beam has unique physical properties such as radially notched intensity distribution, complex phase structure consisting of alternating charge vortex chains, and more sophisticated orbital angular momentum modulation dimension. In recent years, we have noticed that the fractional vortex beam was widely used for complex micro-particle manipulation in optical tweezers, improving communication capacity, controllable edge enhancement of image and quantum entanglement. Moreover, this has stimulated extensive research interest, including the deep digging of the phenomenon and physics based on different advanced beam sources and has led to a new research boom in micro/nano-optical devices. Here, we review the recent advances leading to theoretical models, propagation, generation, measurement, and applications of fractional vortex beams and consider the possible directions and challenges in the future.

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