Zirconium alloys have been used as a fuel cladding material for a long time because they have good corrosion resistance and irradiation stability in a reactor environment. However, it was recognized that the severe oxidation and creep ballooning behaviors of zirconium alloy cladding tubes at an accident condition of a nuclear reactor have to be considered to improve nuclear plant safety after t...

We show that Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) formed from waveguides in a perfectly reflecting cladding can display manifestly different transmission characteristics to conventional MZIs due to mode recirculation and resonant reflection. Understanding and exploiting this behavior, rather than avoiding it, may lead to improved performance of photonic crystal (PC) based MZIs, for which claddin...

We demonstrate a tunable hybrid Graphene-Nd:YAG cladding waveguide laser exploiting the electro-optic and the Joule heating effects of Graphene. A cladding Nd:YAG waveguide was fabricated by the ion irradiation. The multi-layer graphene were transferred onto the waveguide surface as the saturable absorber to get the Q-switched pulsed laser oscillation in the waveguide. Composing with appropriat...

We have demonstrated the operation of a thin-film thermo-optical beam deflector in a three-layer optical planar waveguide. The fabricated waveguide beam deflector consists of a thin-film SiO2 bottom cladding layer, a thin-film polymer top cladding layer, and alternatively positioned thin-film polymer and silica microprisms as the guiding layer. The beam deflection is achieved through the thermo...

We propose a simple analytical theory for low-index core photonic bandgap optical waveguides based on an antiresonant reflecting guidance mechanism. We identify a new regime of guidance in which the spectral properties of these structures are largely determined by the thickness of the high-index layers and the refractive-index contrast and are not particularly sensitive to the period of the cla...

We theoretically analyze plasmonic gap-mode nanocavities covered by a thick cladding layer at telecommunication wavelengths. In the presence of high-index cladding materials such as semiconductors, the first-order hybrid gap mode becomes more promising for lasing than the fundamental one. Still, the significant mirror loss remains the main challenge to lasing. Using silver coatings within a dec...

Chirped cladding is proposed as a novel tailoring tool to simultaneously attain wider transmission window and reduced temporal dispersion in an all-solid Bragg-like microstructured optical fiber as compared to its perfectly periodic cladding counterpart. This design route for photonic bandgap microstructured fibers could be exploited as an additional degree of freedom for bandgap engineering. A...