A polarized backlight for LCD illumination is designed and fabricated in which s-polarized light is extracted owing to selective total internal reflection at microstructures in the anisotropic layer. From the measurement, the contrast ratio in normal viewing direction can be as high as 64. Luminous uniformity of higher than 80% is achieved for polarized backlights. Furthermore, 1.6 gain in effi...

We report the first experimental realization of total internal reflection (TIR) diffraction gratings. Performance of less than 0.7-dB insertion loss (IL) for both TE and TM polarizations and 0.5-dB polarization-dependent loss (PDL) are predicted over a 50-nm spectral bandwidth with simultaneous fabrication tolerances on the depth and the duty cycle of binary gratings of +/-5% and +/-14%, respec...

There is a dizzying array of fluorescent probes now commercially available to monitor cellular processes, and advances in molecular biology have highlighted the ease with which proteins can now be labelled with fluorophores without loss of functionality. This has led to an explosion in the popularity of fluorescence microscopy techniques. One such specialized technique, total internal reflectio...

Total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy is a rapidly expanding optical technique with excellent surface sensitivity and limited background fluorescence. Commercially available TIRF systems are either objective based that employ expensive special high numerical aperture (NA) objectives or prism based that restrict integrating other modalities of investigation for structure-funct...

We investigate the dispersion relation and extinction properties of surface plasmons in an array of gold nanoparticle chains under s-polarized plane wave excitations, through experiment and simulation. Our results reveal that the dispersion and extinction properties of gold nanoparticle chains at an air/glass interface are significantly different from those in a uniform medium. Under total inte...