ANU invention to inspire new night-vision specs December 7, 2016 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ANU Ph.D. student Maria del Rocio Camacho-Morales. Credit: Stuart Hay, ANU Scientists at The Australian National University (ANU) have designed a nano crystal around 500 times smaller than a human hair that turns darkness into visible light and can be used to create light-weight night-vision glasses. Professor Dragomir Neshev from ANU said the new night-vision glasses could replace the cumbersome and bulky night-vision binoculars currently in use. "The nano crystals are so small they could be fitted as an ultra-thin film to normal eye glasses to enable night vision," said Professor Neshev from the Nonlinear Physics Centre within the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. "This tiny device could have other exciting uses including in anti-counterfeit devices in bank notes, imaging cells for medical applications and holograms." Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-12-anu-night-vision-specs.html#jCp
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b03525 Nonlinear Generation of Vector Beams From AlGaAs Nanoantennas: Abstract Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The quest for nanoscale light sources with designer radiation patterns and polarization has motivated the development of nanoantennas that interact strongly with the incoming light and are able to transform its frequency, radiation, and polarization patterns. Here, we demonstrate dielectric AlGaAs nanoantennas for efficient second harmonic generation, enabling the control of both directionality and polarization of nonlinear emission. This is enabled by specialized III–V semiconductor nanofabrication of high-quality AlGaAs nanostructures embedded in optically transparent low-index material, thus allowing for simultaneous forward and backward nonlinear emission. We show that the nanodisk AlGaAs antennas can emit second harmonic in preferential direction with a backward-to-forward ratio of up to five and can also generate complex vector polarization beams, including beams with radial polarization.
