Fundamentals of Plasmonics.- Electromagnetics of Metals.- Surface Plasmon Polaritons at Metal / Insulator Interfaces.- Excitation of Surface Plasmon Polaritons at Planar Interfaces.- Imaging Surface Plasmon Polariton Propagation.- Localized Surface Plasmons.- Electromagnetic Surface Modes at Low Frequencies.- Applications.- Plasmon Waveguides.- Transmission of Radiation Through Apertures and Films.- Enhancement of Emissive Processes and Nonlinearities.- Spectroscopy and Sensing.- Metamaterials and Imaging with Surface Plasmon Polaritons.- Concluding Remarks.

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Plasmonics: Fundamentals and Applications

The unprecedented ability of nanometallic (that is, plasmonic) structures to concentrate light into deep-subwavelength volumes has propelled their use in a vast array of nanophotonics technologies and research endeavours. Plasmonic light concentrators can elegantly interface diffraction-limited dielectric optical components with nanophotonic structures. Passive and active plasmonic devices provide new pathways to generate, guide, modulate and detect light with structures that are similar in size to state-of-the-art electronic devices. With the ability to produce highly confined optical fields, the conventional rules for light-matter interactions need to be re-examined, and researchers are venturing into new regimes of optical physics. In this review we will discuss the basic concepts behind plasmonics-enabled light concentration and manipulation, make an attempt to capture the wide range of activities and excitement in this area, and speculate on possible future directions.

/pdf/plasmonics-for-extreme-light-concentration-and-manipulation-25m55spiva.pdf

Plasmonics for extreme light concentration and manipulation.

Cell membranes display a tremendous complexity of lipids and proteins designed to perform the functions cells require. To coordinate these functions, the membrane is able to laterally segregate its constituents. This capability is based on dynamic liquid-liquid immiscibility and underlies the raft concept of membrane subcompartmentalization. Lipid rafts are fluctuating nanoscale assemblies of sphingolipid, cholesterol, and proteins that can be stabilized to coalesce, forming platforms that function in membrane signaling and trafficking. Here we review the evidence for how this principle combines the potential for sphingolipid-cholesterol self-assembly with protein specificity to selectively focus membrane bioactivity.

/pdf/lipid-rafts-as-a-membrane-organizing-principle-3mxewaemed.pdf

Lipid Rafts As a Membrane-Organizing Principle

We present single-molecule, real-time sequencing data obtained from a DNA polymerase performing uninterrupted template-directed synthesis using four distinguishable fluorescently labeled deoxyribonucleoside triphosphates (dNTPs). We detected the temporal order of their enzymatic incorporation into a growing DNA strand with zero-mode waveguide nanostructure arrays, which provide optical observation volume confinement and enable parallel, simultaneous detection of thousands of single-molecule sequencing reactions. Conjugation of fluorophores to the terminal phosphate moiety of the dNTPs allows continuous observation of DNA synthesis over thousands of bases without steric hindrance. The data report directly on polymerase dynamics, revealing distinct polymerization states and pause sites corresponding to DNA secondary structure. Sequence data were aligned with the known reference sequence to assay biophysical parameters of polymerization for each template position. Consensus sequences were generated from the single-molecule reads at 15-fold coverage, showing a median accuracy of 99.3%, with no systematic error beyond fluorophore-dependent error rates.

/pdf/real-time-dna-sequencing-from-single-polymerase-molecules-3o0n2kc430.pdf

Real-Time DNA Sequencing from Single Polymerase Molecules

The term photonic crystals appears because of the analogy between electron waves in crystals and the light waves in artificial periodic dielectric structures. During the recent years the investigation of one-, two-and three-dimensional periodic structures has attracted a widespread attention of the world optics community because of great potentiality of such structures in advanced applied optical fields. The interest in periodic structures has been stimulated by the fast development of semiconductor technology that now allows the fabrication of artificial structures, whose period is comparable with the wavelength of light in the visible and infrared ranges.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6354/16969/00781867.pdf

Photonic crystals

The advances of the past few years in microreactors have demonstrated that microchips have numerous significant advantages with respect to cost, safety, throughput, kinetics and scale-up [1-3]. The whole aspect of heat management, enabling mass and heat transfer to be extremely rapid, leads to a higher level of reaction control and reactant manipulation at any one point within the chip.

New process for manufacturing ceramic microfluidic devices for microreactor and bioanalytical applications

A simple technique for far-field single-shot noninterferometric determination of the phase transmission matrix of a multicore fiber with over 100 cores is presented. This phase retrieval technique relies on the aperiodic arrangement of the cores.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01876828/document

Single-shot noninterferometric measurement of the phase transmission matrix in multicore fibers

According to one aspect, the invention relates to a device for detecting a resonant nonlinear optical signal of Stimulated Raman Scattering type (SRS) induced in a sample. The device comprises electro-optical means for causing the interaction, in the sample, at a first modulation frequency, of trains of light pulses (14, 12) of angular frequencies ?1 and ?2 and, at a second modulation frequency, trains of light pulses (12, 16) of angular frequencies ?2 and ?3, such that ?2 - ?1 = ?3 - ?2 = OR where OR is an angular frequency of molecular vibrational resonance of the sample. The device furthermore comprises means of synchronous detection (70, 80) at the first and second modulation frequencies of nonlinear optical signals resulting from the interaction of the light pulses in the sample and means of electronic processing (80) making it possible on the basis of electronic signals resulting from the synchronous detection to obtain a signal characteristic of the molecular vibrational resonance of the sample.

Device and method for stimulated raman detection

Compressive Raman is a recent framework that allows for large data compression of microspectroscopy during its measurement. Because of its inherent multiplexing architecture, it has shown imaging speeds considerably higher than conventional Raman microspectroscopy. Nevertheless, the low signal-to-noise (SNR) of Raman scattering still poses challenges for high-sensitivity bio-imaging exploiting compressive Raman: (i) the idle solvent acts as a background noise upon imaging small biological organelles, (ii) current compressive spectrometers are lossy precluding high-sensitivity imaging. We present inexpensive high-throughput spectrometer layouts for high-sensitivity compressive hyperspectroscopy. We exploit various modalities of compressive Raman allowing for up to 80X reduction of data storage and 2X microspectroscopy speed up at a 230-nm spatial resolution. Such achievements allowed us to chemically image sub-diffraction-limited biological specimens (lipid bilayers) in few seconds.

High-sensitivity high-speed compressive spectrometer for Raman imaging

High-speed imaging is of the utmost importance for video-rate live cell investigations or to study extended sample areas at sufficient spatial resolution within reasonable time scales Improving the speed of single-focus stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy is ultimately restricted by the sample’s damage threshold and the shot noise of the demodulated laser source To overcome this limitation, we present a dual-focus SRS approach modulating the pump laser for each focus at a distinct frequency The corresponding probe beams are detected each by a photodiode and demodulated individually by two separate lock-in units to avoid inter-focal cross-talk Two laterally or axially displaced images as well as hyperspectral SRS images can be obtained simultaneously within the field of view of the objective lens The modular implementation presented here can be extended to multiple foci by using multi-channel acousto-optics modulators in combination with multi-channel lock-in amplifiers

Hervé Rigneault

Papers

New process for manufacturing ceramic microfluidic devices for microreactor and bioanalytical applications

Single-shot noninterferometric measurement of the phase transmission matrix in multicore fibers

Device and method for stimulated raman detection

High-sensitivity high-speed compressive spectrometer for Raman imaging

Dual-focus stimulated Raman scattering microscopy: a concept for multi-focus scaling.