Jerome Wenger NanoBioPhotonics

Mr S., the newly elected French president, publicly affirms that paedophilia and suicide are genetically determined.

A positive point is that we no more feel ashamed for our president’s irrelevant opinions.

Nevertheless, the next five years are going to be tough.

From Nature vol. 446, p 854 (19^th April 2007) :

After the Born & Wolf “Principles of Optics”, here is the “Principles of Nano-optics”, a very well-written textbook reviewing many aspects of nanophotonics by Lukas Novotny and Bert Hecht. Highly recommended !!

Click here to read the table of contents and the introduction (courtesy of amazon.fr)

The Mosaic group website at the Fresnel Institute has been updated, with free (electronic reprint) access to our recent publications

http://www.fresnel.fr/mosaic/publications.php

Drilling holes of nanometric dimensions in a metal film is a way conceptually simple to realize new nanophotonic components. In spite of its visible simplicity, a hole drilled in an opaque screen still inspires new perspectives of applications.

In a review published in Nature, Cyriaque Genet and Thomas Ebbesen (Institut de Science and Ingenierie Supramoleculaires, Louis Pasteur university of Strasbourg) give a detailed overview of the current understanding and exploitation of the properties of these structures. The cases of the simple nano-openings, the nano-openings surrounded with concentric engravings, and with periodic networks of nanoholes are successively approached in a very didactic way. 

The field of application of these structures is very wide, and is approached through certain specific examples. In opto-electronics, they improve the extraction of light of electroluminescent diodes and allow the development of ultrafast miniaturized silicon detectors. Biochemistry is another major domain of applications, notably through the detection of individual fluorescent molecules and enhanced infrared vibrational spectroscopy.

I’ve been quite away from the blog (and the lab!) during the last few days…

My daughter Emeline was born March 17th. She’s discovering pretty well her new world, as I am learning my new job of being father.