Microscopic fluorescent samples of interest to cell and molecular biology are commonly embedded in an aqueous medium near a solid surface that is coated with a thin film such as a lipid multilayer, collagen, acrylamide, or a cell wall. Both excitation and emission of fluorescent single molecules near film-coated surfaces are strongly affected by the proximity of the coated surface, the film thi...

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensing is an optical technique that allows real time detection of small changes in the physical properties, in particular in the refractive index, of a dielectric medium near a metal film surface. One way to increase the SPR signal shift is then to incorporate a substance possessing a strong dispersive refractive index in the range of the plasmon resonance band....

Thermally stable nanoporous organosilicate thin films were realized by the microphase separation of pore-generating polymers mixed with an organosilicate matrix to be antireflective coatings (ARCs), for which a thin film with a refractive index (n) of 1.23 for zero reflection is required. The refractive index of such nanoporous organosilicate films can be tuned from 1.39 down to 1.23 by incorpo...

High contrast materials, i.e., materials with a high refractive index and low optical loss, are of wide interest for nanophotonics metasurface designs at near infrared wavelengths. We explore aluminum antimonide (AlSb) as nanophotonic material, using the design gratings (HCGs) loss dielectric mirrors an example. The refraction absorption coefficient AlSb in visible wavelength range enable HCGs ...

This work describes an interferometry data analysis method for determining the optical thickness of thin films or any variation in the refractive index of a fluid or film near a surface. In particular, the method described is applied to the analysis of interferometry data taken with a surface force apparatus (SFA). The technique does not require contacting or confining the fluid or film. By ana...

An analytically tractable design procedure is presented for a polarizing beam splitter (PBS) that uses frustrated total internal reflection and optical tunneling by a symmetric LHL trilayer thin-film stack embedded in a high-index prism. Considerable simplification arises when the refractive index of the high-index center layer H matches the refractive index of the prism and its thickness is qu...

In the open ocean, many animals are highly transparent, some achieving near invisibility. However, little is known about how this transparency is attained. The effects of cellular ultrastructure on tissue transparency were mathematically modeled. Given a specific constant volume or surface area of a higher refractive index material (e.g. protein, lipid, etc.), within a lower refractive index cy...

We present a ray-tracing application in the modeling of an optical detection element employed as a sensor of refractive index of surrounding fluids or gases. The detection element is a solid glass microstructure having a surface of the second order. We exploit the sensitivity of internal reflection of light on the element’s surface to the refractive index of the surrounding medium, operation ne...