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Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that can be perceived by the human eye. Visible light is usually defined as having wavelengths in the range of 400–700 nanometres (nm), corresponding to frequencies of 750–420 terahertz, between the infrared (with longer wavelengths) and the ultraviolet (with shorter wavelengths). In physics, the term "light" may refer more broadly to electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength, whether visible or not. In this sense, gamma rays, X-rays, microwaves and radio waves are also light. The primary properties of light are intensity, propagation direction, frequency or wavelength spectrum and polarization. Its speed in vacuum, 299792458m/s, is one of the fundamental constants of nature. Like all types of electromagnetic radiation, visible light propagates by massless elementary particles called photons that represents the quanta of electromagnetic field, and can be analyzed as both waves and particles. The study of light, known as optics,

Ultra low quantum decoherence nano-optomechanical systems

Mohammadjafar Bereyhi

Thermal motion of a room-temperature mechanical resonator typically dominates the quantum backaction of its position measurement. This is a longstanding barrier for exploring cavity optomechanics at room temperature. In order to enter the quantum regime of the optomechanical interaction, we need to be in the "backaction-dominated" regime, where we can study the limits of quantum measurement and how to circumvent them. To create a system which can enter the quantum regime, the optomechanical transducer has to satisfy certain criteria. A quantum-enabled optomechanical system consists of an optical cavity and a mechanical resonator with ultra low quantum decoherence, which are strongly coupled to each other via the optomechanical interaction.High stress silicon nitride has enabled nanomechanical resonators with exceptionally low dissipation at room temperature via several soft-clamping techniques. Achieving high optomechanical coupling to these coherent nanobeams results in high optomechanical cooperativities, thus alleviating the thermal motion barrier for room temperature quantum optomechanics. Monolithic integration of high-Q nanobeam resonators with optical cavities has been limited to doubly-clamped nanobeams due to the complexity of the device fabrication and long device sizes required for conventional soft-clamping using phononic crystals. In addition, the previous demonstrations of such systems showed limited optomechanical couplings thus a limited single photon cooperativity.I present the design, fabrication and characterization of three different classes of nanomechanical resonators clamp-tapered, fractal-like, and polygon resonators, which support perimeter modes, with Q factors exceeding 3 billion at room temperature and their optical readout using an integrated nearfield nano-optomechanical transducer using high stress silicon nitride. Our transducer features a one-dimensional Fabry-Perot optical cavity integrated with a high-Q nanomechanical resonator. The Fabry-Perot optical cavity is formed by patterning two photonic crystal reflectors on a silicon nitride waveguide designed for high-Q optical modes. Our approach allows individual optimization of optical and mechanical resonators, while maintaining a high optomechanical coupling rate due to large optomechanical mode overlap. Our best performing devices show on-chip optomechanical transducers with single photon cooperativities as high as 123 with mechanical quality factor of 120 million at room temperature. The developed system is of great interest to the optomechanics and sensing community. In quantum optomechanics, it will serve as a platform for quantum feedback control of the nanomechanical resonators to achieve motional ground state of a macroscopic resonator and generation of squeezed light at room temperature. Owing to their record value mechanical quality factors, the room temperature force sensitivity of our highest Q perimeter modes is on par with atomic force microscopy cantilevers at millikelvin temperature.Complete documentation of a nanofabrication process is the key to its reproducibility. Process-specific details of the fabrication techniques are usually missing in journal publications. To bridge this gap, I developed NanoFab-net.org. An online open-access tool that allows sharing process-specific fabrication reports, extracting the metadata and obtaining a unique digital object identifier (DOI) for each report.

EPFL2022

Spatial and Morphological Control of Cyanine Dye Thin Films

Nicolas Alexandre Serge Leclaire

Cyanine dyes are organic semiconductor compounds with light absorption and emission properties useful for emerging technologies such as solar cells and light-emitting devices. The characteristics of these materials in the solid state depend on their organization of the constituting building blocks. This thesis focuses on controlling the morphology of cyanine dye thin films at different length scales and clarifying the resulting properties. When microstructures present features whose size matches visible light wavelengths, new properties may arise from light-matter interactions. Here the properties resulting from the light-matter interactions of cyanine droplet films cast from solution are studied. Based on experimental evidence, it is shown that dye droplet ensembles scatter light with different efficiencies and wavelength ranges depending on their dimensions. FDTD simulations are used to show that this effect results fromscattering enhancement at the absorption edge of the dye where the refractive index varies considerably. Simulations also provide a better understanding of individual dropletsâ interaction with light. While earlier work had hypothesized that the observed scattering phenomenon were due to crystalline clusters within the droplets, this work highlights the contribution of the dye filmmorphology. Cyanines also form single crystals whose fabrication induces molecular-scale order in the material. Previous work demonstrated that thin single crystals could be grown by solvent vapor annealing of dye droplets. Here it is shown that in uncontrolled conditions, cyanine single crystals destabilize to formdendritic crystals. In-situ microscopy observations highlight the solute reservoir role of the droplet distribution surrounding a growing crystal; when the distance between droplets and the crystal front is large, the solute supply is diffusion-limited. Moreover variations in local pressure equilibrium between the droplets and crystal front lead to advection fluxes which perturb the crystal growth. These observations help design configurations to either prevent crystal destabilization or take advantage of the dendritic growth in a controlled manner. In addition, the patterning of crystals on a substrate is relevant for their application in devices. A practical challenge is to induce single crystal growth at specific locations. Here, surfaces patterned with SAMs of hydrophilic and hydrophobic thiols are used to create dye droplet arrays from which crystals can be grown. This method is shown to yield local crystallization of the dye and to prevent crystal destabilization through better control of the droplet distribution. By varying the dye solution concentration, partial control over crystal density is achieved, however it proved difficult to control the number of nuclei per droplet. A more controlled evaporation and solvent vapor annealing system might be necessary to master the nucleation process. Finally the structure and optical properties of cyanine single crystals are addressed. The crystal structure was determined by X-ray diffraction. Structural aspects are shown to lead to excitonic couplings, which are evidenced by orientation-dependent spectroscopic measurements of single crystals. Although further investigation of the absorption band structure is necessary, the results are promising for photovoltaic devices as they might improve exciton transport compared to amorphous layers.

EPFL2018

Optische Augenlängenmessung für klinische Anwendungen

Beate Möller

Cataract is the leading cause of blindness worldwide. The clouding of the human eye lens is called "Grauer Star" in German. In the industrialized countries this process of increased blindness is corrected by the surgical removal of the clouded lens and its replacement by a plastic lens (intraocular lens, IOL). Cataract surgery is the most frequent surgery worldwide. In Europe more than two million operations are performed annually. For the selection of an optimum replacement the refractive power of the lens is calculated from the radius of curvature of the cornea, the length of the eye and the anterior chamber depth. Therefore these data have to be measured before every surgery. Until now the length of the eye was measured exclusively by ultrasound in the clinical praxis. For this procedure the sound transducer has to be placed directly or via a water funnel onto the cornea. It was the aim of the work presented in this thesis to lay the framework for introducing into the clinical praxis a contact free optical length measurement of the eye. The basic parameters for the measurement were determined. Starting from the state of the art new solutions were found, implemented in a laboratory device, and tested clinically. A two-beam interferometer with light of short coherence length that had been developed at the University Vienna was analyzed and compared with the one-beam technique. Neglecting practical limitations due to the optical arrangement and assuming shot-noise limited detection the one-beam technique allows the measurement of reflected light that is a factor of two lower compared to the two-beam technique. From the point of view of detection both techniques are therefore equivalent. The advantage of the two-beam technique is its independence from the eye movement. Until now the two-beam technique utilizes for detection only 1 over 400 of the light reflected from the retina and 1 over 2500 to 1 over 4000 of the light reflected from the cornea. This causes the dynamic range to drop by 26 dB. Furthermore the noise of the electronics (excess noise) comes into play. In this work a novel concept for the optical configuration in the two-beam interferometer is presented. By using a diffractive lens cornea and retina are imaged simultaneously onto the detector and the losses of the light from the retina are minimized. The cornea is imaged with an efficiency of 5.6 per cent. In order to minimize the requirements on the patient the measuring time was shortened to 1 s. Therefore the scan speed was increased by a factor of four compared to the state of the art. In the laboratory device it fluctuated by 20 per cent. To keep the detection narrow band it was necessary to implement a signal processing that is largely independent of the scan speed. By using a synchronous demodulation of two 90 degrees phase-shifted channels that are added as vector quantities a filter with self-adjusting center frequency was created. Its bandwidth is 4 kHz with signal frequencies between 30 kHz and 90 kHz. This concept was realized as a compact slit-lamp head and tested clinically. A shot-noise limited detection with a dynamic range of 105 dB was achieved (input power 200 µW). On the healthy eye the signal-to-noise ratio was limited by the digitization range of 8 bit. On the eye with cataract the measuring was not limited by the degree of clouding any more. The optical lengths were determined along the line of sight. They agreed with the post operative results. In some cases refractive errors of more than 2 dpt would have been avoidable by determining the IOL from the measurement of the optical length of the eye. This technique allows a comfortable, contact free optical eye length measurement that works correctly in 95 per cent of all eyes with cataract. Additionally smaller post operative refractive errors can be achieved as compared with traditional techniques. These results were the basis for the development of the IOL-Master – a novel device for the cataract treatment – at the Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH. With this device all biometric data can be measured in a non-contact fashion and intraocular lenses can be calculated and selected.

EPFL2001