A novel means of generating radially polarized light is reported in this paper. A birefringent plate was placed in a divergent or divergent portion of the laser beam for polarisation conversation. The influence of birefringent plate thickness on the purity and efficiency of radial beam conversion is studied qualitatively. This technique is robust, simple and cost effective for radial polarisati...

The purpose of this paper was to study the reaction of rat subcutaneous connective tissue to the implantation of dentin tubes filled with white mineral trioxide aggregate (MTA), a material that will be marketed. The tubes were implanted into rat subcutaneous tissue and the animals were sacrificed after 7 and 30 days. The undecalcified pieces were prepared for histological analysis with polarize...

The Faraday effect is an extremely useful probe of magnetization dynamics on an ultrafast scale. However, the measured Faraday rotation is difficult to interpret in birefringent media. We investigate the link between magnetization and Faraday rotation by solving Maxwell’s equations in a magnetically ordered, birefringent material. We find that the Faraday rotation can depend nonlinearly on the ...

Axonal path-finding is important in the development of the nervous system, nerve repair and nerve regeneration. The behaviour of the growth cone at the tip of the growing axon determines the direction of axonal growth and migration. We have developed an optical-based system to control the direction of growth of individual axons (nerve fibres) using laser-driven spinning birefringent spheres. On...

We report on a simple method of locking a laser to a birefringent cavity using polarization spectroscopy. The birefringence of the resonator permits the simple extraction of an error signal by using one polarization state as a phase reference for another state. No modulation of the light or the resonator is required, reducing the complexity of the laser locking setup. This method of producing a...

Three-dimensional optical microscopy suffers from the well-known compromise between transverse resolution and depth-of-field. This is true for both structural imaging methods and their functional extensions. Interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM) is a solution to the 3D coherent microscopy inverse problem that provides depth-independent transverse resolution. We demonstrate the ex...

The birefringent halfwave plate (HWP) polarization modulator, while new to the CMB field, has been used for decades at shorter wavelengths. The basic idea is simple; a polarized plane wave passing through a HWP will have its polarization orientation rotated by ∆ψ = 2θ, where θ is the angle between the incident polarization and one of the optical crystal axes. Rotating a HWP in front of a linear...

Quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field give rise to a zeropoint energy that persists even in the absence of electromagnetic sources. One striking consequence of the zero-point energy is manifested in the Casimir force, which causes two electrically neutral metallic plates to attract in order to reduce the zero-point energy. A second, less well-known, effect is a torque that arises be...

2014 Polygonal defect arrays in lipid liquid crystals prepared from dipalmitoyl-, dimyristoyl-, and dilaurylphosphatidylcholine with various concentrations of water have been observed and characterized using optical microscopy. These arrays appear similar to the polygonal arrays previously observed in thermotropic smectic and cholesteric liquid crystals. The parabolic focal conic model proposed...

The morphology of the isolated sea-urchin mitotic apparatus (MA) was examined by light and electron microscopy. With the polarization microscope and the Nomarski differential interference microscope, the isolated MAs appeared to be similar to in vivo MAs. Electron microscopy of the isolated MAs revealed the presence of microtubules, ribosome-like particles and vesicles. A close association betw...