Investigating the Optical Properties of a Laser Induced 3D Self-Assembled Carbon-Metal Hybrid Structure.

Carbon-based and carbon-metal hybrid materials hold great potential for applications in optics and electronics. Here, a novel material made of carbon and gold-silver nanoparticles is discussed, fabricated using a laser-induced self-assembly process. This self-assembled metamaterial manifests itself in the form of cuboids with lateral dimensions on the order of several micrometers and a height of tens to hundreds of nanometers.

2D Optical Gratings Based on Hexagonal Voids on Transparent Elastomeric Substrate.

A chromatic vectorial strain sensor constituted by hexagonal voids on transparent elastomeric substrate has been successfully fabricated via soft colloidal lithography. Initially a highly ordered 1.6 microns polystyrene spheres monolayer colloidal crystal has been realized by wedge-shaped cell method and used as a suitable mold to replicate the periodic structure on a polydimethylsiloxane sheet.

On the convergence and accuracy of the FDTD method for nanoplasmonics.

Use of the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method to model nanoplasmonic structures continues to rise - more than 2700 papers have been published in 2014 on FDTD simulations of surface plasmons. However, a comprehensive study on the convergence and accuracy of the method for nanoplasmonic structures has yet to be reported. Although the method may be well-established in other areas of electromagnetics, the peculiarities of nanoplasmonic problems are such that a targeted study on convergence and accuracy is required.

Light-opals interaction modeling by direct numerical solution of Maxwell's equations.

This work describes a 3-D Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) computational approach for the optical characterization of an opal photonic crystal. To fully validate the approach we compare the computed transmittance of a crystal model with the transmittance of an actual crystal sample, as measured over the 400 ÷ 750 nm wavelength range. The opal photonic crystal considered has a face-centered cubic (FCC) lattice structure of spherical particles made of polystyrene (a non-absorptive material with constant relative dielectric permittivity).