The differentiation of progenitor cells is dependent on more than biochemical signalling. Topographical cues in natural bone extracellular matrix guide cellular differentiation through the formation of focal adhesions, contact guidance, cytoskeletal rearrangement and ultimately gene expression. Osteoarthritis and a number of bone disorders present as growing challenges for our society. Hence, t...

We present a simple-to-align, highly-portable interferometer, which is able to capture wide-field, off-axis interference patterns from transparent samples under low-coherence illumination. This small-dimensions and low-cost device can be connected to the output of a transmission microscope illuminated by a low-coherence source and measure sub-nanometric optical thickness changes in a label-free...

We report on a new method to characterize nanohydrodynamic properties at the liquid-solid interface relying solely on the measurement of the thermal motion of confined colloids. This equilibrium measurement of surface properties--equivalent in spirit to the passive microrheology technique used for bulk properties--is able to achieve nanometric resolution on the slip length measurement. Explorin...

Holography has extremely extensive applications in conventional optical instruments spanning optical microscopy and imaging, three-dimensional displays and metrology. To integrate holography with modern low-dimensional electronic devices, holograms need to be thinned to a nanometric scale. However, to keep a pronounced phase shift modulation, the thickness of holograms has been generally limite...

Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) on atomic D1 line of rubidium is studied using a nanometricthin cell with atomic vapor column length in the range of L = 400 800 nm. It is shown that the reduction of the cell thickness by 4 orders as compared with an ordinary cm-size cell still allows to form an EIT resonance for L = λ (λ = 794 nm) with the contrast of up to 40 %. Remarkable disti...