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Materials for optics are substances used to manipulate the flow of light. This can include reflecting, absorbing, focusing or splitting an optical beam. The efficiency of a specific material at each task is strongly wavelength dependent, thus a full understanding of the interaction between light and matter is vital.
Spatial Kramers–Kronig (KK) media are inhomogeneous materials enabling omnidirectional light absorption, but the successful experimental realizations are polarization-dependent, i.e., they absorb either transverse electric or transverse magnetic fields. Using a matryoshka metamaterial, the authors report the experimental realization of a polarization-independent omnidirectional absorber.
Transparent roofs offer a solution for harnessing natural light in sustainable buildings. Here, authors demonstrate a polymer-based metamaterial with micro-pyramid surface structures that diffuses sunlight while offering passive cooling and self-cleaning properties.
L-shaped silicon metamaterials are realized exhibiting broadband and enhanced chirality. The current work sets new benchmarks in the assembly of ultrathin dielectric chiral metamaterials that can efficiently control chiral light-matter interactions.
Room-temperature phosphorescence usually occurs immediately after the removal of excitation. Here the authors achieve combined instant and delayed phosphorescence through introduction of phosphines into carbazole emitters.
Room-temperature phosphorescence is usually inefficient in purely organic material. Here, the authors achieve near-unity phosphorescence efficiency with color tunability in adaptive host-guest materials through use of hyperconjugation.
Self-assembly of small nanoparticles is difficult to control and the resultant structures have weak stability. Here, a general centimeter-scale superlattice assembly strategy for noble metal nanoparticles of less than 15 nm is used to yield stable hexagonal close-packed monolayers.
Highly efficient matrix-free hyperfluorescent organic light-emitting diodes are constructed with remarkably supressed Dexter transfer utilizing narrowband blue emitters encapsulated with hopped alkyl chains.
Properly maintaining the skin temperature is critical for wound healing, especially outdoors. Now, a lightweight and skin-friendly wound dressing is reported that can continuously cool the skin without energy input.
Even by shining classical light on a single opening, one can perform a double-slit experiment and discover a surprising variety of quantum mechanical multi-photon correlations — thanks to surface plasmon polaritons and photon-number-resolving detectors.
The frequency of coherent terahertz waves radiated from a single superconducting emitter can be electronically modulated on a chip with up to 40 GHz bandwidth, paving the way for high-data-rate and ultrafast terahertz wireless communications.
A process that leverages capillary interactions between oligomers in an elastomeric polydimethylsiloxane substrate and deposited Ga enables the formation of Ga nanodroplets with nanoscale gaps in a single step. Gap-plasmon resonances excited within the nanogaps give rise to structural colours that can be tuned by changing the oligomer content in the substrate or by mechanical stretching.