Microwave-Induced Inverse Faraday Effect in Superconductors.

The inverse Faraday effect (IFE) in superconductors is proposed, where a static magnetization is generated under the influence of a circularly polarized microwave field. Classical modeling of the IFE explicitly provides superconducting gyration coefficient in terms of its complex conductivity. The IFE is then considered as a source of nonlinearity and gyrotropy even at a low-power microwave regime giving rise to a spectrum of phenomena and applications.

Sociotechnical Drivers and Barriers in the Consumer Adoption of Personal Health Records: Empirical Investigation.

Background: Increasingly popular in the health care domain, electronic personal health records (PHRs) have the potential to foster engagement toward improving health outcomes, achieving efficiencies in care, and reducing costs. Despite the touted benefits of PHRs, their uptake is lackluster, with low adoption rates.

Objective: This paper reports findings from an empirical investigation of the sociotechnical factors affecting the adoption of PHRs.

Experimental Characterization of the Ultrafast, Tunable and Broadband Optical Kerr Nonlinearity in Graphene.

Graphene's giant nonlinear optical response along with its integrability has made it a vaunted material for on-chip photonics. Despite a multitude of studies confirming its strong nonlinearity, there is a lack of reports examining the fundamental processes that govern the response. Addressing this gap in knowledge we analyse the role of experimental parameters by systematically measuring the near-infrared spectral dependence, the sub-picosecond temporal evolution and pulse-width dependence of the effective Kerr coefficient (n,) of graphene in hundreds of femtosecond regime.

Plasmonic superconducting nanowire single photon detector.

A theoretical analysis to enhance the quantum efficiency of a meander-line superconducting single photon detector without increasing the length or thickness of the active element is proposed. The general idea is to utilize the plasmonic nature of a superconducting layer to increase the surface absorption of the input optical signal. To satisfy both optical guiding and photon detection considerations of the design, a coefficient is introduced as a measure to maintain the device sensitivity while crossing over from the current crowding to vortex-based detection mechanisms.

Reduced dark counts in optimized geometries for superconducting nanowire single photon detectors.

We have experimentally compared the critical current, dark count rate and photo-response of 100nm wide superconducting nanowires with different bend designs. Enhanced critical current for nanowires with optimally rounded bends, and thus with no current crowding, are observed. Furthermore, we find that the optimally designed bend significantly reduces the dark counts without compromising the photo-response of the device.