One major hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) is the deposition of extracellular senile plaques and vessel wall deposits composed of amyloid-beta (Aβ). In AD, degeneration of neurons is preceded by the formation of Aβ plaques, which show different morphological forms. Most of them are birefringent owing to the parallel arrangement of amyloid fibrils. Here,...

The high degree of ultrastructural organization of microtubular crystals (1, 2) produced in mammalian cells by incubation with Vinca alkaloids, suggested that these crystals would be birefringent in polarized light. We now report the induction by vinblastine sulfate (VBL) of birefringent crystals in unfertilized oocytes of the starfish Pisaster ochraceous . Mature ovaries were removed, placed i...

Introduction Supercontinuum (SC) has attracted considerable attentions due to its versatility in many fields such as telecommunication [1], optical metrology [2] and medical science. The SC phenomenon originates from the third-order nonlinearity of the media. In nonlinear optical fibers, both chromatic dispersion and nonlinear effects determine the SC generation characteristics. Different dispe...

Jones–Stokes polarimetry is a robust in vitro polarimetric technique that can be used to investigate the anisotropic properties of birefringent medium. The study spatially resolved Jones matrix components an object heuristic approach extract its phase and polarization information. However, direct interpretation elements their decomposition into associated sample still challenging research probl...

Ultrasonic methodologies of air-coupled guided waves, birefringent shear waves, and nonlinear ultrasound are presented and applied to the characterization of aerospace materials. The guided waves generated by air-coupled ultrasound provide non-contact monitoring of in-plane stiffness anisotropy and high-contrast imaging of defects in a single-sided access configuration. Mapping of local fibre o...

We present experimental results on supercontinuum generation in a highly birefringent microstructured fiber. We show that such a fiber offers clear advantages for continuum generation over weakly birefringent fibers. In particular, the polarization is preserved along the fiber for all the spectral components. Furthermore, the two eigenpolarizations exhibit different dispersion characteristics, ...

We constructed a metallic grating on a deep-subwavelength scale and tested its plasmonic features in visible frequencies. The deep-subwavelength metallic grating effectively acts as an anisotropic homogeneous uniaxial form-birefringent metal, exhibiting different optical responses for polarizations along different optical axes. Therefore, this form-birefringent metal supports anisotropic surfac...