Biomedical subjects

Boris Gralak

Publications and source records attributed to Boris Gralak.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Thermal radiation scanning tunnelling microscopy.

In standard near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM), a subwavelength probe acts as an optical 'stethoscope' to map the near field produced at the sample surface by external illumination. This technique has been applied using visible, infrared, terahertz and gigahertz radiation to illuminate the sample, providing a resolution well beyond the diffraction limit. NSOM is well suited to study surface waves such as surface plasmons or surface-phonon polaritons. Using an aperture NSOM with visible laser illumination, a near-field interference pattern around a corral structure has been observed, whose features were similar to the scanning tunnelling microscope image of the electronic waves in a quantum corral. Here we describe an infrared NSOM that operates without any external illumination: it is a near-field analogue of a night-vision camera, making use of the thermal infrared evanescent fields emitted by the surface, and behaves as an optical scanning tunnelling microscope. We therefore term this instrument a 'thermal radiation scanning tunnelling microscope' (TRSTM). We show the first TRSTM images of thermally excited surface plasmons, and demonstrate spatial coherence effects in near-field thermal emission.

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PubMed2005

Perfect corner reflector.

We numerically investigate the electromagnetic field radiated by a line source within a perfect lens [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 3966 (2000)] consisting of two orthogonal planes delimiting positive and negative index media. Use of a coordinate transformation [J. Phys. Condens Matter 15, 6345 (2003)] together with a well-adapted transfer-matrix method permits rigorous calculation of the vector field. We find that two negative corners combine to make a cavity that traps light along closed trajectories. Finally, we numerically show that the field presents some spatial oscillations with a period that is proportional to absorption sigma inside the negative materials as 1/ln sigma and that it is associated with an infinite density of states when sigma tends toward 0.

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PubMed2004

Enhanced transmission due to nonplasmon resonances in one- and two-dimensional gratings.

Enhanced transmission through subwavelength slit gratings and hole arrays is studied in view of its application in the far-infrared and microwave domains. Because for perfectly conducting gratings, plasmon resonances are not expected to produce an enhanced transmission, other kinds of resonance, such as Fabry-Perot, waveguide-mode, and cavity-mode resonances, are studied. The possibility of reaching 100% transmittivity for some particular wavelengths is established when two superimposed identical gratings are used while each of them transmits approximately 1% off resonance. A similar transmission is obtained with hole arrays. The study of the field map inside the groove region allows our establishing the nature of the resonance, that is involved. Comparison of the bandwidth with respect to the wavelength or incidence given by various kinds of resonance is presented.

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PubMed2003

Theoretical study of photonic band gaps in woodpile crystals.

We investigate numerically the existence of photonic band gaps in woodpile crystals. We present a numerical method specifically developed to solve Maxwell's equations in such photonic structures. It is based upon a rigorous mathematical formulation and leads to a considerable improvement of the convergence speed as compared to other existing numerical methods. We tested our method by comparing the calculated reflectivity with measurements on an actual sample, i.e., a silicon woodpile photonic crystal designed for 1.5 microm wavelength. Excellent agreement is obtained, provided the main structural imperfections of the sample are taken into account. We show that the existence of photonic band gaps in woodpile crystals requires an index contrast higher than 2.05 +/- 0.01. The effects of imperfections of such structures with an index contrast equal to 2.25 are also investigated. Thus, the relative band gap width falls from 3.5% to 2.2% with structurals imperfection similar to those of the sample.

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PubMed2002

Staircase approximation validity for arbitrary-shaped gratings.

An electromagnetic study of the staircase approximation of arbitrary shaped gratings is conducted with three different grating theories. Numerical results on a deep aluminum sinusoidal grating show that the staircase approximation introduces sharp maxima in the local field map close to the edges of the profile. These maxima are especially pronounced in TM polarization and do not exist with the original sinusoidal profile. Their existence is not an algorithmic artifact, since they are found with different grating theories and numerical implementations. Since the number of the maxima increases with the number of the slices, a greater number of Fourier components is required to correctly represent the electromagnetic field, and thus a worsening of the convergence rate is observed. The study of the local field map provides an understanding of why methods that do not use the staircase approximation (e.g., the differential theory) converge faster than methods that use it. As a consequence, a 1% accuracy in the efficiencies of a deep sinusoidal metallic grating is obtained 30 times faster when the differential theory is used in comparison with the use of the rigorous coupled-wave theory. A theoretical analysis is proposed in the limit when the number of slices tends to infinity, which shows that even in that case the staircase approximation is not well suited to describe the real profile.

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PubMed2002

From scattering or impedance matrices to Bloch modes of photonic crystals.

The dispersion relation of Bloch waves is derived from the properties of a single grating layer. A straightforward way to impose the Bloch condition leads to the calculation of the eigenvalues of the transfer matrix through the single grating layer. Unfortunately, the transfer-matrix algorithm is known to be unstable as a result of the growing evanescent waves. This problem appears again in the calculation of the eigenvalues, making unusable the transfer matrix in numerous practical problems. We propose two different algorithms to circumvent this problem. The first one takes advantage of scattering matrices, while the second one takes advantage of impedance matrices. Numerical evidence of the efficiency of the algorithms is given. Dispersion diagrams of simple cubic and woodpile photonic crystals are obtained by using, respectively, the scattering and impedance matrices.

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