Polarized light microscopy provides unique opportunities for analyzing the molecular order in man-made and natural materials, including biological structures inside living cells, tissues, and whole organisms. 20 years ago, the LC-PolScope was introduced as a modern version of the traditional polarizing microscope enhanced by liquid crystal devices for the control of polarization, and by electro...

In the recent decade metamaterials with magnetic permeability different than unity and unusual response to the magnetic field of incident light have been intensively explored. Existence of magnetic artificial materials created an interest in a scanning near-field magnetic microscope for studies of magnetic responses of subwavelength elementary cells of those metamaterials. We present a method o...

Ion beam shaping is a novel and powerful tool to engineer nanocomposites with effective three-dimensional (3D) architectures. In particular, this technique offers the possibility to precisely control the size, shape and 3D orientation of metallic nanoparticles at the nanometer scale while keeping the particle volume constant. Here, we use swift heavy ions of xenon for irradiation in order to su...

A herringbone "easy axis" pattern is scribed into a polyimide alignment layer for liquid-crystal orientation using the stylus of an atomic force microscope. Owing to the liquid crystal's bend elasticity K33 , the nematic director is unable to follow the sharp turn in the scribed easy axis, but instead relaxes over an extrapolation length L=K33/W2φ, where W2φ is the quadratic azimuthal anchoring...

This paper presents a study on the effect of matrix material on the morphology and optical properties of self-assembled InP-based InAsSb nanostructures. Due to the differences in surface roughness of the growth front, In0.53Ga0.47As matrix layer induces the formation of short quantum dashes QDashes and elongated quantum dots, while InP and In0.52Al0.48As matrix layers promote the formation of l...

zno and zno:mn nanocrystals synthesized via reverse micelle method. the size, band gap, urbach energy, optical constants and penetration depth of nanocrystals were calculated by uv-vis spectroscopy data. the surface morphology was studied with the use of scanning electron microscope (sem). moreover the samples exposed to gama ray source of 60co and their thermoluminescence properties were also ...

We demonstrate controlled trapping and manipulation of single silver (Ag) nanowires in two dimensions at a surface using structured light fields generated with a spatial light modulator. The Ag nanowires are attracted toward the regions of maximal optical intensity along the surface when the trapping laser light is linearly polarized and are repelled toward the minima of optical intensity when ...

A recently introduced two-channel confocal microscope with correlated detection promises up to 50% improvement in transverse spatial resolution [Simon, Sergienko, Optics Express 18, 9765 (2010)] via the use of photon correlations. Here we achieve similar results in a different manner, introducing a triple-confocal correlated microscope which exploits the correlations present in optical parametr...

Malaria pigment is an intracellular inclusion body that appears in blood and tissue specimens on microscopic examination and can help in establishing the diagnosis of malaria. In simple light microscopy, it can be difficult to discern from cellular background and artifacts. It has long been known that if polarized light microscopy is used, malaria pigment can be much easier to distinguish. Howe...

Two-photon photopolymerization (TPP) has been shown to be a versatile tool for fabricating subwavelength features that are localized in three dimensions (3D) [1]. However, detection of the photopolymerized structures after polymerization is difficult as the polymerized regions exhibit poor contrast against the background when viewed under a conventional light microscope. Furthermore, the tradit...