The authors demonstrate a method of texturing a meshed surface on a poly(dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS) film for improving light extraction. This meshed surface is fabricated through a casting process by using a self-organized porous film as a template. Experimental results show that the light outcoupling efficiency increases on the meshed surface of a freestanding PDMS film with large incident angles. The external quantum efficiency of an organic light-emitting diode with the textured PDMS film was also demonstrated to have an enhancement of 46%.

Tunable coupling regimes of a silicon microdisk resonator controlled by MEMS (microelectromechanical system) actuation are demonstrated for the first time. By varying the gap spacing between the waveguide and the disk, this microresonator can dynamically operate in either under-, ciritcal or over-coupling regime. The waveguide transmittance is suppressed by 30 dB in critical coupling, and the quality factor of the microdisk is measured to be as high as 10(5). Additionally, the microdisk presents tunable group delay from 27 ps to 65 ps, and tunable group velocity dispersion from 185 ps/nm to 1200 ps/nm. Waveguides, microdisks and actuators are all integrated on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate. This compact device exhibits the promise to construct resonator-based reconfigurable photonic integrated circuits.

The authors investigated the anode work function modified by series of self-assembled monolayers comprising alkanethiols and perfluorinated alkanethiols with different alkyl lengths on pentacene/fullerene thin-film organic solar cells. Via selecting different types of self-assembled molecules, the anode work function can be tailored for modifying the interfacial barrier. The measured open-circuit voltages indicated reduced anode work function that tends to form Schottky contact. The maximal open-circuit voltage and short-circuit current were measured to be 0.4V and 17.7mA∕cm2, respectively, in the case of anode work function modified by perfluorinated alkanethiols. The power conversion efficiency is 2.24%.

A high sensitive sensor is demonstrated by exploiting strong transverse magneto-optical Kerr effect on a ferromagnetic surface plasmon grating. The surface plasmon grating, made of a hybridized Au/Fe/Au layer, exhibits a very dispersive Kerr parameter variation near the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) wavelength via coherent scattering of the SPP on the grating structure. Interrogating this Kerr parameter can be utilized for detecting chemical or biological objects in a fluid medium. The experiment results show the minimal detectable mass concentration of sodium chloride in a saline solution is 4.27 × 10(-3) %, corresponding to a refractive index change of 7.60 × 10(-6) RIU. For an avidin-biotin interaction experiment, the sensitivity of avidin detection in PBS solution is 1.97 nM, which is limited by the index fluctuation of flowing media during measurement.

A novel technique using surface tension to locally bond germanium (Ge) on silicon (Si) is presented for fabricating high performance Ge/Si photodiodes. Surface tension is a cohesive force among liquid molecules that tends to bring contiguous objects in contact to maintain a minimum surface energy. We take advantage of this phenomenon to fabricate a heterojunction optoelectronic device where the lattice constants of joined semiconductors are different. A high-speed Ge/Si heterojunction waveguide photodiode is presented by microbonding a beam-shaped Ge, first grown by rapid-melt-growth (RMG) method, on top of a Si waveguide via surface tension. Excellent device performances such as an operating bandwidth of 17 GHz and a responsivity of 0.66 and 0.70 A/W at the reverse bias of −4 and −6 V, respectively, are demonstrated. This technique can be simply implemented via modern complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication technologies for integrating Ge on Si devices.