This paper discusses the issues involving the design and fabrication of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL’s). A review of the basic experimental structures is given, with emphasis on recent developments in distributed Bragg reflectors, gain media, as well as current and optical confinement techniques. The paper describes present VCSEL performance, in particular, those involving sel...

We use numerical simulations to investigate how the curvature of the fiber core boundary influences the attenuation of hollow antiresonant fibers. We show the importance of a "negative" curvature core boundary in reducing confinement losses and also how, for certain curvatures, optical power is coupled resonantly to cladding modes. We simulate bending losses and find results in agreement with p...

By using scanning near-field optical microscopy, we directly map the subwavelength confinement of light around a point defect in a two-dimensional photonic crystal microresonator. Comparison of our results with the outcome of three-dimensional finite-difference time domain calculations allows us to identify small imperfections in the structure that result in the spatial modification of the inte...

In [Math. Meth. Appl. Sci. 19 (1996) 53-62], C. Marchioro examined the problem of vorticity confinement in the exterior of a smooth bounded domain. The main result in Marchioro’s paper is that solutions of the incompressible 2D Euler equations with compactly supported nonnegative initial vorticity in the exterior of a connected bounded region have vorticity support with diameter growing at most...

It is not unreasonable to expect that boreal forests which exist along 60 o N in the Eurasian and North American continents were created and are maintained by warm seasonal rainfall. As revealed from satellite observations and various precipitation sources, zonally elongated rainbelts appear along these forests. Previous studies show that a relationship may exist between the frontal zone along ...

Semiconductor structures with reduced dimensionality often have optical properties that are quite different than the optical properties of crystalline matter. For example, silicon has a band gap of about 1.2 eV in the crystalline state whereas nanocrystalline dots of silicon have “band gaps” of ∼ 2 eV or larger. Until recently, the modification of the gap from quantum confinement has not been e...

Many types of optical switching devices have been studied and demonstrated using nonlinear effects in a variety of semiconductor materials and more recently in optical fibers. Light-controlled switches have a wide variety of potential applications in optical communications and high-speed optoelectronic systems. Optically controlled, fiber-based switches such as loop mirrors or soliton gates can...

The addressing of the liquid crystals in spatial light modulators gives rise to temporal modulation of the phase pattern. Here we investigate the effect of this on the intensity and position of holographic optical traps. We use high-speed camera imaging of the laser spots back-reflected off the sample cover slip to determine the integrated pixel intensity and track the position of a laser spot....

Laser radiation pressure is a basis of numerous applications in science and technology such as atom cooling, particle manipulation, material processing, etc. This light force for the case of scalar beams is proportional to the intensity-weighted wavevector known as optical current. The ability to design the optical current according to the considered application brings new promising perspective...

Structuring metallic and magnetic materials on subwavelength scales allows for extreme confinement and a versatile design of electromagnetic field modes. This may be used, for example, to enhance magneto-optical responses, to control plasmonic systems using a magnetic field, or to tailor magneto-optical properties of individual nanostructures. Here we show that periodic rectangular arrays of ma...