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A series of immiscible crystalline–crystalline diblock copolymers, poly(ethylene oxide)-b-(ε-caprolactone) (PEO-b-PCL), were synthesized through ring-opening polymerization and then blended with phenolic resin. FT-IR analyses demonstrate that the ether group of PEO is a stronger hydrogen-bond acceptor with the hydroxyl group of phenolic resin than is the carbonyl group of PCL. Phenolic, after being cured with hexamethylenetetramine (HMTA), results in the excluded and confined PCL phase based on analyses by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). This effect leads to the formation of a variety of composition-dependent nanostructures, including disorder, gyroid and short-cylinder structures. The self-organized mesoporous phenolic resin was found only at 40–60 wt % phenolic content by an intriguing balance of the contents of phenolic, PEO, and PCL. In addition, the mesoporous structure was destroyed at higher PCL/PEO ratios in the block copolymers, as determined by small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) experiments. In addition, the large and long-range order of bicontinuous gyroid-type mesoporous carbon was obtained from mesoporous gyroid phenolic resin calcined at 800 °C under nitrogen.

Chirped quasi-phasematching (QPM) optical devices offer the potential for ultrawide bandwidths, high conversion efficiencies, and high amplification factors across the transparency range of QPM media. In order to properly take advantage of these devices, apodization schemes are required. We study apodization in detail for many regimes of interest, including low-gain difference frequency generation (DFG), high-gain optical parametric amplification (OPA), and high-efficiency adiabatic frequency conversion (AFC). Our analysis is also applicable to secondharmonic generation, sum frequency generation, and optical rectification. In each case, a systematic and optimized approach to grating construction is provided, and different apodization techniques are compared where appropriate. We find that nonlinear chirp apodization, where the poling period is varied smoothly, monotonically, and rapidly at the edges of the device, offers the best performance. We consider the full spatial structure of the QPM gratings in our simulations, but utilize the first order QPM approximation to obtain analytical and semianalytical results. One application of our results is optical parametric chirped pulse amplification; we show that special care must be taken in this case to obtain high gain factors while maintaining a flat gain spectrum.

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We report the synthesis, fabrication and extensive characterization of a visible-blind photodetector based on p-i-n junction GaN nanowire ensembles. The nanowires were grown by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy on an n-doped Si(111) substrate, encapsulated into a spin-on-glass and processed using dry etching and metallization techniques. The detector presents a high peak responsivity of 0.47 A W(-1) at - 1 V. The spectral response of the detector is restricted to the UV range with a UV-to-visible rejection ratio of 2 x 10(2). The dependence on the incident power and the operation speed of the photodetector are discussed.