In-vacuum active colour sensor and wireless communication across a vacuum-air interface.

In situ sensing with wireless digital-data transfer is a potential processing scheme that works very closely to the location of an event monitored by a sensor and converts the sensor's raw output into digitized and informative small-volume bits, as suggested by recent proposals for edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). Colour perception may be a target of in situ sensor data acquisition; however, in contrast to from other sensing devices, colour sensors that detect visible light signals are usually located away from light-emitting sources, collecting light transmitting through the space and attenuating it in some manner. For example, in a vacuum chamber whose gas pressure is much less than the ambient atmosphere in which the sensors usually work, there are many veiled light sources, such as discharge plasma, for various industrial purposes including nanoscale manufacturing. In this study, we designed an in-vacuum colour sensor that can work with analogue-to-digital conversion and transfer data by wireless communication; this sensor is active in a low-pressure plasma chamber, detecting light signals and transferring them to a personal computer located outside the vacuum chamber. In addition to detecting lights with controlled spectra from outside successfully, we achieved complete operation of our in-vacuum active sensor for plasma emissions generated at 100 Pa. Comparing the signals with data from simultaneous monitoring by a monochromator, we established that the recorded signals arose from the plasma, confirming successful direct detection of low-pressure plasma emissions without any filtering effects between the sensor and the target object.

Analysis and observation of the breakdown of Babinet's principle in complementary spoof surface plasmon polariton structures.

A metal plate array (MPA) which is a structure complimentary to a metal hole array (MHA), supports spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPP) as well as an MHA does. Babinet's principle attributes the phenomenon of duality to transmission characteristics of the complimentary impedance surfaces because of the symmetry of the behaviors of electric and magnetic fields. However, it is also a fact that the complimentary structures do not follow this principle if they have wavelength-size thickness, because electromagnetic waves do not treat such thick structures as a boundary surface but as propagation spaces with the specific boundaries such as a waveguide which shows SSPP modes. If the thickness is so small that it is negligible, Babinet's principle is still valid, while it has been uncertain how the layer thickness works to break the principle as it is increased. The unconfirmed transformation is revealed analytically and experimentally with the use of MPAs and MHAs of varying thicknesses.