We analyze the rotational dynamics of light driven nanorotors, made of nanotube bundles and gold nanorods aggregates, with nonsymmetric shapes, trapped in optical tweezers. We identify two different regimes depending on dimensions and optical properties of the nanostructures. These correspond to alignment with either the laser propagation axis or the dominant polarization direction, or rotation...

Optical waveguide adiabatic tapers enable low-loss connections between devices with dissimilar mode profiles. Common examples are semiconductor lasers, single-mode optical fibers and planar waveguides. Planar lithographic processes can easily create tapers in the plane but out-of-plane, symmetric tapers are difficult. Three-dimensional direct-write lithography into photopolymer naturally create...

Expressions corresponding to the transmission of a uniaxial optically active crystal platelet are provided for an optical axis parallel and perpendicular to the plane of interface. The optical activity is taken into account by a consistent multipolar expansion of the crystal medium response due to the path of an electromagnetic wave. Numerical examples of the effect of the optical activity are ...

Abstract The angular momentum Jinc of a light beam can be changed by passage through a slab of crystal. When the beam is incident along the optic axis of a biaxial crystal, which may also possess optical activity (chirality), the final angular momentum J can have both orbital (Jorb) and spin (Jsp) contributions, which we calculate paraxially exactly for arbitrary biaxiality and chirality and in...

We derive a general theory for imaging by a flat lens without optical axis. We show that the condition for imaging requires a material having elliptic dispersion relations with negative group refraction. This medium is characterized by two intrinsic parameters sigma and kappa. Imaging can be achieved with both negative and positive wave vector refraction if sigma is a positive constant. The Ves...

If a polychromatic ray segment enters an optical system, is dispersed into many slightly different paths through the system, and finally emerges at a single point, then the incident segment defines what Le Grand and Ivanoff called an achromatic axis of the system. Although their ideas of some 65 years ago have inspired important work on the optics of the eye there has been no analysis of such a...

We study the impact of 1/f noise on the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) observations (Mandolesi et al. 1998) and describe a simple method for removing striping effects from the maps for a number of different scanning strategies. A configuration with an angle between telescope optical axis and spin-axis just less than 90 (namely ≃ 85) shows good destriping efficiency for all receivers in t...

We demonstrate off-axis spectral beam combining applied to a 980 nm high power broad area diode laser bar. The experiments yielded 9 W of optical power at 30 A of operating current and the measured M2 values of the combined beam from 12 emitters were 1.9 and 6.4 for the fast and the slow axis, respectively. The slow axis beam quality was 5-6 times better than the value obtained from a single em...

A systematic optical study of infrared-active phonons is carried out for optimally doped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+d (Bi2212) single crystals with E-vector along c-axis as well as in the ab-plane at 295K. Strong phonon anisotropy has been observed in our ab-plane conductivity measurements. Ten infrared-active phonons have been observed along c-axis. Many of these c-axis infrared-active phonons have energie...

A fully automatic, four-axis gonioreflectometer is described. It has an angular accuracy of 0.3 degrees and a range of 90 degrees in both the theta(i) and the theta(r) zenith angles. The gonioreflectometer is simpler than previous designs because of its use of rotating arms rather than moving carriages to mount the optical components. Where possible, commercial components have been used to redu...