As the performance of photovoltaic cells approaches the Shockley-Queisser limit, appropriate schemes are needed to minimize the losses without compromising the current performance. In this paper we propose a planar absorber-mirror light trapping structure where a conventional mirror is replaced by a meta-mirror with asymmetric light scattering properties. The meta-mirror is tailored to have ref...

We show that the effective decay rate of Zeeman coherence, generated in a 87 Rb vapor by linearly polarized laser light, increases significantly with the atomic density. We explain this phenomenon as the result of radiation trapping. Our study shows that radiation trapping must be taken into account to fully understand many electromagnetically induced transparency experiments with optically thi...

We systematically investigate the design of two-dimensional silver (Ag) hemisphere arrays on crystalline silicon (c-Si) ultrathin film solar cells for plasmonic light trapping. The absorption in ultrathin films is governed by the excitation of Fabry-Perot TEMm modes. We demonstrate that metal hemispheres can enhance absorption in the films by (1) coupling light to c-Si film waveguide modes and ...

Light trapping across a wide band of frequencies is important for applications such as solar cells and photodetectors. Here, we demonstrate a new approach to light management by forming whispering-gallery resonant modes inside a spherical nanoshell structure. The geometry of the structure gives rise to a low quality-factor, facilitating the coupling of light into the resonant modes and substant...

The photochemical and electrochemical investigations of commercially available, safe, and cheap fluorescent brighteners, namely, triazinylstilbene (commercial name: fluorescent brightener 28) and 2,5-bis(5-tert-butyl-benzoxazol-2-yl)thiophene, as well as their original use as photoinitiators of polymerization upon light emitting diode (LED) irradiation are reported. Remarkably, their excellent ...

In 1865 James Clerk Maxwell showed how light propagates as electromagnetic waves. In 1984 it was realized that light can also be trapped1. My journey into this subject began as a PhD student at Harvard University, focusing on the possibility to trap or localize any classical wave in a suitable material2. This was not one of the ‘big questions of science’ at the time, but my supervisor Michael J...

Optical trapping can manipulate the three-dimensional (3D) motion of spherical particles based on the simple prediction of optical forces and the responding motion of samples. However, controlling the 3D behaviour of non-spherical particles with arbitrary orientations is extremely challenging, due to experimental difficulties and extensive computations. Here, we achieve the real-time optical co...

Effective magnetic moments of drift Rydberg atoms in strong magnetic fields are obtained for different energy and angular-momentum states. Classical two-body trajectory calculations and quantummechanical one-body calculations are employed. For heavy atoms such as rubidium, the trapping dynamics can largely be explained by the net magnetic moment due to the cyclotron and the magnetron motion of ...

Optical trapping is a technique for immobilizing and manipulating small objects in a gentle way using light, and it has been widely applied in trapping and manipulating small biological particles. Ashkin and co-workers first demonstrated optical tweezers using a single focused beam. The single beam trap can be described accurately using the perturbative gradient force formulation in the case of...

Optical trapping and manipulation of micrometre-sized particles was first reported in 1970. Since then, it has been successfully implemented in two size ranges: the subnanometre scale, where light-matter mechanical coupling enables cooling of atoms, ions and molecules, and the micrometre scale, where the momentum transfer resulting from light scattering allows manipulation of microscopic object...