Two recipes for repelling hot water.

Although a hydrophobic microtexture at a solid surface most often reflects rain owing to the presence of entrapped air within the texture, it is much more challenging to repel hot water. As it contacts a colder material, hot water generates condensation within the cavities at the solid surface, which eventually builds bridges between the substrate and the water, and thus destroys repellency. Here we show that both "small" (~100 nm) and "large" (~10 µm) model features do reflect hot drops at any drop temperature and in the whole range of explored impact velocities. Hence, we can define two structural recipes for repelling hot water: drops on nanometric features hardly stick owing to the miniaturization of water bridges, whereas kinetics of condensation in large features is too slow to connect the liquid to the solid at impact.

Adaptive Control of Necklace States in a Photonic Crystal Waveguide.

Resonant cavities with high quality factor and small mode volume provide crucial enhancement of light-matter interactions in nanophotonic devices that transport and process classical and quantum information. The production of functional circuits containing many such cavities remains a major challenge, as inevitable imperfections in the fabrication detune the cavities, which strongly affects functionality such as transmission. In photonic crystal waveguides, intrinsic disorder gives rise to high-Q localized resonances through Anderson localization; however their location and resonance frequencies are completely random, which hampers functionality. We present an adaptive holographic method to gain reversible control on these randomly localized modes by locally modifying the refractive index. We show that our method can dynamically form or break highly transmitting necklace states, which is an essential step toward photonic-crystal-based quantum networks and signal processing circuits, as well as slow light applications and fundamental physics.

Nonlinearities in GaAs cavities with high CW input powers enabled by photo-oxidation quenching through ALD encapsulation.

We demonstrate that conformal encapsulation using atomic layer deposition of GaAs nano-cavity resonator made of photonic crystal cavity prevents photo-induced oxidation. This improvement allows injecting a large quantity of energy in the resonator without any degradation of the material, thus enabling spectral stability of the resonance. We prove second harmonic and third harmonic generation over more than one decade of pump power variation, thanks to this encapsulation, with a total efficiency (ηSHG = 8.3 × 10-5 W-1 and ηTHG = 1.2 × 10-3 W-2 ) and a large net output energy for both operations (PSHGout=0.2nW and PTHGout=8pW).

Antifogging abilities of model nanotextures.

Nanometre-scale features with special shapes impart a broad spectrum of unique properties to the surface of insects. These properties are essential for the animal's survival, and include the low light reflectance of moth eyes, the oil repellency of springtail carapaces and the ultra-adhesive nature of palmtree bugs. Antireflective mosquito eyes and cicada wings are also known to exhibit some antifogging and self-cleaning properties. In all cases, the combination of small feature size and optimal shape provides exceptional surface properties. In this work, we investigate the underlying antifogging mechanism in model materials designed to mimic natural systems, and explain the importance of the texture's feature size and shape. While exposure to fog strongly compromises the water-repellency of hydrophobic structures, this failure can be minimized by scaling the texture down to nanosize. This undesired effect even becomes non-measurable if the hydrophobic surface consists of nanocones, which generate antifogging efficiency close to unity and water departure of droplets smaller than 2 µm.

Free-carrier-induced soliton fission unveiled by in situ measurements in nanophotonic waveguides.

Solitons are localized waves formed by a balance of focusing and defocusing effects. These nonlinear waves exist in diverse forms of matter yet exhibit similar properties including stability, periodic recurrence and particle-like trajectories. One important property is soliton fission, a process by which an energetic higher-order soliton breaks apart due to dispersive or nonlinear perturbations. Here we demonstrate through both experiment and theory that nonlinear photocarrier generation can induce soliton fission. Using near-field measurements, we directly observe the nonlinear spatial and temporal evolution of optical pulses in situ in a nanophotonic semiconductor waveguide. We develop an analytic formalism describing the free-carrier dispersion (FCD) perturbation and show the experiment exceeds the minimum threshold by an order of magnitude. We confirm these observations with a numerical nonlinear Schrödinger equation model. These results provide a fundamental explanation and physical scaling of optical pulse evolution in free-carrier media and could enable improved supercontinuum sources in gas based and integrated semiconductor waveguides.

Multi-photon absorption limits to heralded single photon sources.

Single photons are of paramount importance to future quantum technologies, including quantum communication and computation. Nonlinear photonic devices using parametric processes offer a straightforward route to generating photons, however additional nonlinear processes may come into play and interfere with these sources. Here we analyse spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) sources in the presence of multi-photon processes. We conduct experiments in silicon and gallium indium phosphide photonic crystal waveguides which display inherently different nonlinear absorption processes, namely two-photon (TPA) and three-photon absorption (ThPA), respectively. We develop a novel model capturing these diverse effects which is in excellent quantitative agreement with measurements of brightness, coincidence-to-accidental ratio (CAR) and second-order correlation function g((2))(0), showing that TPA imposes an intrinsic limit on heralded single photon sources. We build on these observations to devise a new metric, the quantum utility (QMU), enabling further optimisation of single photon sources.

Strongly coupled slow-light polaritons in one-dimensional disordered localized states.

Cavity quantum electrodynamics advances the coherent control of a single quantum emitter with a quantized radiation field mode, typically piecewise engineered for the highest finesse and confinement in the cavity field. This enables the possibility of strong coupling for chip-scale quantum processing, but till now is limited to few research groups that can achieve the precision and deterministic requirements for these polariton states. Here we observe for the first time coherent polariton states of strong coupled single quantum dot excitons in inherently disordered one-dimensional localized modes in slow-light photonic crystals. Large vacuum Rabi splittings up to 311 µeV are observed, one of the largest avoided crossings in the solid-state. Our tight-binding models with quantum impurities detail these strong localized polaritons, spanning different disorder strengths, complementary to model-extracted pure dephasing and incoherent pumping rates. Such disorder-induced slow-light polaritons provide a platform towards coherent control, collective interactions, and quantum information processing.

Heralded single-photon source in a III-V photonic crystal.

In this Letter we demonstrate heralded single-photon generation in a III-V semiconductor photonic crystal platform through spontaneous four-wave mixing. We achieve a high brightness of 3.4×10(7) pairs·s(-1) nm(-1) W(-1) facilitated through dispersion engineering and the suppression of two-photon absorption in the gallium indium phosphide material. Photon pairs are generated with a coincidence-to-accidental ratio over 60 and a low g(2) (0) of 0.06 proving nonclassical operation in the single photon regime.

Chip-scale parametric amplifier with 11 dB gain at 1550 nm based on a slow-light GaInP photonic crystal waveguide.

We report on a chip scale parametric amplifier based on a GaInP photonic crystal waveguide. The amplifier operates with both pump and signal in the 1550 nm wavelength range and offers an on-chip gain of 11 dB (5 dB including the 6 dB coupling losses) when pumped at only 800 mW. It enables us, therefore, to incorporate the many advantages of parametric amplification within photonic chips for optical communication applications.

Integrable microwave filter based on a photonic crystal delay line.

The availability of a tunable delay line with a chip-size footprint is a crucial step towards the full implementation of integrated microwave photonic signal processors. Achieving a large and tunable group delay on a millimetre-sized chip is not trivial. Slow light concepts are an appropriate solution, if propagation losses are kept acceptable. Here we use a low-loss 1.5 mm-long photonic crystal waveguide to demonstrate both notch and band-pass microwave filters that can be tuned over the 0-50-GHz spectral band. The waveguide is capable of generating a controllable delay with limited signal attenuation (total insertion loss below 10 dB when the delay is below 70 ps) and degradation. Owing to the very small footprint of the delay line, a fully integrated device is feasible, also featuring more complex and elaborate filter functions.

Control of dispersion in photonic crystal waveguides using group symmetry theory.

We demonstrate dispersion tailoring by coupling the even and the odd modes in a line-defect photonic crystal waveguide. Coupling is determined ab-initio using group theory analysis, rather than by trial-error optimisation of the design parameters. A family of dispersion curves is generated by controlling a single geometrical parameter. This concept is demonstrated experimentally with very good agreement with theory.

Observation of parametric gain due to four-wave mixing in dispersion engineered GaInP photonic crystal waveguides.

We investigate four-wave mixing (FWM) in GaInP 1.5 mm long dispersion engineered photonic crystal waveguides. We demonstrate an 11 nm FWM bandwidth in the CW mode and a conversion efficiency of -24 dB in the quasi-CW mode. For picosecond pump and probe pulses, we report a 3 dB parametric gain and nearly a -5 dB conversion efficiency at watt-level peak pump powers.

Real-time increase in depth of field of an uncooled thermal camera using several phase-mask technologies.

Imaging systems that combine a phase mask in the pupil and digital postprocessing may have better performance than conventional ones. We have built such a system to enhance the depth of field of an uncooled thermal camera. The phase masks are binary, their structures are optimized thanks to an image quality criterion, and they have been realized with three different technologies that give equivalent results. The deconvolution postprocessing is performed in real time with a graphics processing unit. A significant increase of the depth of field of a factor 3 has been obtained.