Dynamic control over optical wavefronts enables focusing, diffraction and redirection of light on demand, however, sub-wavelength resolution is required to avoid unwanted diffracted beams that are present in commercial spatial light modulators. Here we propose a realistic metadevice that dynamically controls the optical phase of reflected beams with sub-wavelength pixelation in one dimension. B...

Diffraction, interference, dispersive refraction and scattering are four wavelength-dependent mechanisms that produce iridescent colors. The per-wavelength sampling required to render iridescence significantly increases the computation required to render iridescence in real time. Furthermore, diffraction exhibits much higher frequencies and sharper peak responses than interference and dispersiv...

We report the experimental implementation of optical diffraction tomography for quantitative 3D mapping of refractive index in live biological cells. Using a heterodyne Mach-Zehnder interferometer, we record complex field images of light transmitted through a sample with varying directions of illumination. To quantitatively reconstruct the 3D map of complex refractive index in live cells, we ap...

The partial differential equation for the wave function in the problem of the diffraction of light by an ultrasonic wave is derived as the result of transformations and related approximations of the electrical field equation itself. It is shown that this way of treating the diffraction problem is equivalent to the generating function method applied to the Raman-Nath system of difference-differe...

Pseudorandom encoding (PRE) is a statistics-based procedure in which a pure-phase spatial light modulator (SLM) can yield, on the average, the prescribed diffraction pattern specified by the user. We seek to combine PRE with the optimization of an aperture-based target function. The target function is a fully complex input transmittance, unrealizable by a phase-only SLM, that generates a prescr...

The optical diffraction limit has been the dominant barrier to achieving higher optical resolution in the fields of microscopy, photolithography, and optical data storage. We present here an approach toward imaging below the diffraction barrier. Through the exposure of photosensitive films placed a finite and known distance away from nanoscale, zero-mode apertures in thin metallic films, we sho...

We developed a simple method to fabricate colloidal crystal heterostructures (CCHs) with two or three stacked poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) particle two-dimensional (2D) colloidal monolayer arrays of different particle spacings that independently diffract light. The 2D colloidal monolayer arrays of PMMA were prepared by using the air/water interface self-assembly method we recently developed...

We report on measurements of the light absorption efficiency of InSb nanowires. The absorbed 70 fs light pulse generates carriers, which equilibrate with the lattice via electron-phonon coupling. The increase in lattice temperature is manifested as a strain that can be measured with X-ray diffraction. The diffracted X-ray signal from the excited sample was measured using a streak camera. The am...

The effect of the UV-absorbing sensitizing pigment of fly photoreceptors on absolute, spectral and angular sensitivity was investigated with a wave-optics model for the facet lens-rhabdomere system. When sky light was used as a UV-rich light source, one sensitizing pigment molecule per rhodopsin increased the photoreceptor absorption by 14-18% with respect to pure rhodopsin, whilst two sensitiz...

We study propagation of light beams in two-dimensional photonic lattices created by periodically curved waveguide arrays. We demonstrate that by designing the waveguide bending, one can control not only the strength and sign of the beam diffraction, but also to engineer the effective geometry and even dimensionality of the two-dimensional photonic lattice. We reveal that diffraction of differen...