Articles récents

OMNT annual meeting 2011

14 Décembre 2010 , Rédigé par JW Publié dans #Nanophotonics pick

My colleague Renaud Bachelot will give a seminar on plasmonic nanosources of light during the next annual meeting of the French Observatory of Micro and Nano Technologies OMNT.

If you have the opportunity to attend to this series of seminars, don't miss it. The general quality is very high, and I'm sure Renaud will do an excellent job. Inscriptions go here.

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Training project / Internship / PhD position nanophotonics

8 Décembre 2010 , Rédigé par JW Publié dans #Nanophotonics pick

Currenly open is a position for undergraduate internship training project working on nanophotonics for advanced fluorescence sensing and single molecule detection. More details are given here.

Relevant candidates have a physics, biophysics or engineering background, with a strong motivation and willingness to join a multidisciplinary international team.

The position can be continued as PhD project, conditionnal to the succesful application for a PhD grant.

According to national rules, undergraduate trainees will be supported by a monthly grant of 398,13 € (only valid or training periods longer than two months).

 

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Latest article: enhanced second harmonic generation on nanoapertures

7 Décembre 2010 , Rédigé par JW Publié dans #Recent research work

My team has recently published a study on second harmonic generation on single gold nanoapertures. This was released in the December 1st issue of Optics Letters. You can find a free reprint here.

Metal nanostructures are interesting emitters for second harmonic generation (SHG) radiation, which occurs essentially from the non-centrosymmetry breaking at the metal-medium interface for objects of the order of 50nm-100nm size.
At MOSAIC we demonstrate the ability of single-subwavelength-size nanoapertures fabricated in a gold metal thin film to enhance second-harmonic generation (SHG) as compared to a bare metal film. Nonlinear microscopy imaging with polarization resolution is used to quantify the SHG enhancement in circular and triangular nanoaperture shapes.

This study has two main results:
* The SHG enhancement on circular nanoapertures is demonstrated to originate from both phase retardation effects and field enhancements at the aperture edge.
* Triangular nanoapertures exhibit superior SHG enhancement compared with circular ones, as expected from their noncentrosymmetric shape.

http://www.fresnel.fr/spip/spip.php?action=acceder_document&arg=910&cle=1c8136e1a56b4a85ff4774cbaa23da08&file=jpg%2FSHGnanotrou.jpg

http://www.fresnel.fr/spip/spip.php?action=acceder_document&arg=911&cle=8157aa5d6e6e02d70616ab93564f79e4&file=jpg%2FPeterNanoSHG.jpg

Cool video: iso-microscopy

23 Novembre 2010 , Rédigé par JW Publié dans #Nanophotonics pick

Isotropic single-objective microscopy (ISO-microscopy) is a novel method developed by colleagues at the Fresnel Institute to overcome the limits set by diffraction in optical microscopy. With ISO-microscopy, light is focused into an isotropic spherical spot of about one wavelength dimension.

 

Watch this video to learn how ISO-microscopy works !

 


 

Latest article: enhanced two-photon excitation of fluorescence

4 Novembre 2010 , Rédigé par JW Publié dans #Recent research work

Two-photon excitation of single fluorescent molecules has generated much interest and expectations, especially for analytical sciences. However, current demonstrations struggle with low two-photon fluorescence rate per molecule and/or high background. In a recent publication in Biomedical Optics Express, we answer these challenges by using a single polystyrene microsphere under focused Gaussian illumination. This opens new opportunities to extend the applications of two-photon fluorescence detection.

1- We demonstrate a simple, robust, and low-cost solution to enhance the two-photon fluorescence signal per molecule up to one order of magnitude, without adding any significant photoluminescence noise. This goes significantly beyond the current state-of-the-art.

2- We perform a thorough characterization of the two-photon fluorescence enhancement in the vicinity of a single dielectric microsphere, and report 30x higher fluorescence enhancement factors than earlier work in the field.

3- The microspheres form an interesting structure to compare the gains in one- and two-photon excitation of fluorescence. Such comparison has been seldom reported in the litterature.

 

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