There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

The synthesis of massive arrays of monodispersed carbon nanotubes that are self-oriented on patterned porous silicon and plain silicon substrates is reported. The approach involves chemical vapor deposition, catalytic particle size control by substrate design, nanotube positioning by patterning, and nanotube self-assembly for orientation. The mechanisms of nanotube growth and self-orientation are elucidated. The well-ordered nanotubes can be used as electron field emission arrays. Scaling up of the synthesis process should be entirely compatible with the existing semiconductor processes, and should allow the development of nanotube devices integrated into silicon technology.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/283/5401/512.full.pdf

Self-Oriented Regular Arrays of Carbon Nanotubes and Their Field Emission Properties

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

We demonstrate that a monolayer graphene membrane is impermeable to standard gases including helium. By applying a pressure difference across the membrane, we measure both the elastic constants and the mass of a single layer of graphene. This pressurized graphene membrane is the world's thinnest balloon and provides a unique separation barrier between 2 distinct regions that is only one atom thick.

/pdf/impermeable-atomic-membranes-from-graphene-sheets-xtis5huy2d.pdf

Impermeable atomic membranes from graphene sheets.

A large amount of work world-wide has been directed towards obtaining an understanding of the fundamental characteristics of porous Si. Much progress has been made following the demonstration in 1990 that highly porous material could emit very efficient visible photoluminescence at room temperature. Since that time, all features of the structural, optical and electronic properties of the material have been subjected to in-depth scrutiny. It is the purpose of the present review to survey the work which has been carried out and to detail the level of understanding which has been attained. The key importance of crystalline Si nanostructures in determining the behaviour of porous Si is highlighted. The fabrication of solid-state electroluminescent devices is a prominent goal of many studies and the impressive progress in this area is described.

The structural and luminescence properties of porous silicon

We show that modulators using slow-light Mach-Zehnder interferometers can be miniaturized, but at the price of bandwidth. We offer guidelines to replace this tradeoff with a more favorable one between length reduction and manufacturing variation.

Removing the Bandwidth Limitation in Slow-Light Mach-Zehnder Modulators

Metal-coated ultrathin nanocrystalline Si membranes provides a novel substrate for biochemical sensing. FDTD simulations show SPR formation. The SPR peak is polarization dependent. Sensing experiments are performed with IPA and methanol.

Metallized ultrathin nanocrystalline Si membranes as biochemical SPR sensors

Free carrier absorption is the major obstacle towards achieving optical gain in Er-doped nc-Si. We experimentally demonstrated the suppression of free carrier absorption by multi-slot waveguide. The experimental results agree well with our theoretical calculations.

Suppression of free carrier absorption in multi-slot silicon light emission devices

We report a novel design for single molecule detection using photonic bandgap structures on SOI wafer. The device works at communication band and can be potentially used for single molecule detection.

Single Molecule Detection Using Silicon Photonic Crystal Slab

Using the unique beating patterns in periodically-patterned ring resonators operating in the slow light regime, we demonstrate a novel drop filter with channels outputs depending on the relative azimuthal position between the input and drop port waveguides.

Philippe M. Fauchet

Papers

Removing the Bandwidth Limitation in Slow-Light Mach-Zehnder Modulators

Metallized ultrathin nanocrystalline Si membranes as biochemical SPR sensors

Suppression of free carrier absorption in multi-slot silicon light emission devices

Single Molecule Detection Using Silicon Photonic Crystal Slab

Azimuthal position dependent optical drop filters based on periodically patterned silicon microring resonators