Huygens description of resonance phenomena in subwavelength hole arrays

We develop a point-scattering approach to the plane-wave optical transmission of subwavelength metal hole arrays. We present a real space description instead of the more conventional reciprocal space description; this naturally produces interfering resonant features in the transmission spectra and makes explicit the tensorial properties of the transmission matrix. We give transmission spectra simulations for both square and hexagonal arrays; these can be evaluated at arbitrary angles and polarizations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Torsional response and stiffening of individual multi-walled carbon nanotubes

We report on the characterization of torsional oscillators which use multi-walled carbon nanotubes as the spring elements. Through atomic-force-microscope force-distance measurements we are able to apply torsional strains to the nanotubes and measure their torsional spring constants and effective shear moduli. We find that the effective shear moduli cover a broad range, with the largest values near the theoretically predicted value. The data also suggest that the nanotubes are stiffened by repeated flexing.Comment: 4 page

Conductivity in organic semiconductors hybridized with the vacuum field

Organic semiconductors have generated considerable interest for their potential for creating inexpensive and flexible devices easily processed on a large scale [1-11]. However technological applications are currently limited by the low mobility of the charge carriers associated with the disorder in these materials [5-8]. Much effort over the past decades has therefore been focused on optimizing the organisation of the material or the devices to improve carrier mobility. Here we take a radically different path to solving this problem, namely by injecting carriers into states that are hybridized to the vacuum electromagnetic field. These are coherent states that can extend over as many as 10^5 molecules and should thereby favour conductivity in such materials. To test this idea, organic semiconductors were strongly coupled to the vacuum electromagnetic field on plasmonic structures to form polaritonic states with large Rabi splittings ca. 0.7 eV. Conductivity experiments show that indeed the current does increase by an order of magnitude at resonance in the coupled state, reflecting mostly a change in field-effect mobility as revealed when the structure is gated in a transistor configuration. A theoretical quantum model is presented that confirms the delocalization of the wave-functions of the hybridized states and the consequences on the conductivity. While this is a proof-of-principle study, in practice conductivity mediated by light-matter hybridized states is easy to implement and we therefore expect that it will be used to improve organic devices. More broadly our findings illustrate the potential of engineering the vacuum electromagnetic environment to modify and to improve properties of materials.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figure

Dimerization structures on the metallic and semiconducting fullerene tubules with half-filled electrons

Possible dimerization patterns and electronic structures in fullerene tubules as the one-dimensional pi-conjugated systems are studied with the extended Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. We assume various lattice geometries, including helical and nonhelical tubules. The model is solved for the half-filling case of $\pi$-electrons. (1) When the undimerized systems do not have a gap, the Kekule structures prone to occur. The energy gap is of the order of the room temperatures at most and metallic properties would be expected. (2) If the undimerized systems have a large gap (about 1eV), the most stable structures are the chain-like distortions where the direction of the arranged trans-polyacetylene chains is along almost the tubular axis. The electronic structures are ofsemiconductors due to the large gap.Comment: submitted to Phys. Rev. B, pages 15, figures 1

Polarization tomography of metallic nanohole arrays

We report polarization tomography experiments on metallic nanohole arrays with square and hexagonal symmetry. As a main result, we find that a fully polarized input beam is partly depolarized after transmission through a nanohole array. This loss of polarization coherence is found to be anisotropic, i.e. it depends on the polarization state of the input beam. The depolarization is ascribed to a combination of two factors: i) the nonlocal response of the array due to surface plasmon propagation, ii) the non-plane wave nature of a practical input beam.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, submitted to PR

Observation of Enhanced Beaming from Photonic Crystal Waveguides

We report on the experimental observation of the beaming effect in photonic crystals enhanced via surface modes. We experimentally map the spatial field distribution of energy emitted from a subwavelength photonic crystal waveguide into free-space, rendering with crisp clarity the diffractionless beaming of energy. Our experimental data agree well with our numerical studies of the beaming enhancement in photonic crystals with modulated surfaces. Without loss of generality, we study the beaming effect in a photonic crystal scaled to microwave frequencies and demonstrate the technological capacity to deliver long-range, wavelength-scaled beaming of energy.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Observation of ultrafast internal conversion in fullerene anions in solution

The ultrafast decay rates of photoexcited View the MathML source ions have been measured in the condensed phase. The mechanism for decay is internal conversion, and the decay rate is a strong function of the charge on the ion. A bottleneck in the ground state recovery has also been detected, and its interpretation is discussed

Disclination vortices in elastic media

The vortex-like solutions are studied in the framework of the gauge model of disclinations in elastic continuum. A complete set of model equations with disclination driven dislocations taken into account is considered. Within the linear approximation an exact solution for a low-angle wedge disclination is found to be independent from the coupling constants of the theory. As a result, no additional dimensional characteristics (like the core radius of the defect) are involved. The situation changes drastically for 2\pi vortices where two characteristic lengths, l_\phi and l_W, become of importance. The asymptotical behaviour of the solutions for both singular and nonsingular 2\pi vortices is studied. Forces between pairs of vortices are calculated.Comment: 13 pages, published versio

Size Effects in Carbon Nanotubes

The inter-shell spacing of multi-walled carbon nanotubes was determined by analyzing the high resolution transmission electron microscopy images of these nanotubes. For the nanotubes that were studied, the inter-shell spacing ${\hat{d}_{002}}$ is found to range from 0.34 to 0.39 nm, increasing with decreasing tube diameter. A model based on the results from real space image analysis is used to explain the variation in inter-shell spacings obtained from reciprocal space periodicity analysis. The increase in inter-shell spacing with decreased nanotube diameter is attributed to the high curvature, resulting in an increased repulsive force, associated with the decreased diameter of the nanotube shells.Comment: 4 pages. RevTeX. 4 figure

Life span, leukaemia and amyloid incidences of untreated and polycation-treated AKR mice.

AKR mice, which have a short mean survival time and usually die with leukaemia, were studied from one month of age for correlation between these two parameters. For untreated animals we found the same mean survival time whether or not leukaemia occurred. By treating sucklings with the polycations diethylaminoethyl-dextran or hexadimethrine bromide the leukaemia incidence was significantly reduced. However, the mean survival time was unchanged, and remained the same in leukaemic and non-leukaemic animals. It is therefore suggested that the early death of AKR mice results from an ageing process and does not require leukaemia for implementation. Our prophylactic polycation treatment was furthermore found to induce spleen amyloid in some but not all of the mice that remained non-leukaemic