Mirror Structure Research Articles

Laser Control of Specular and Diffuse Reflectance of Thin Aluminum Film-Isolator-Metal Structures for Anti-Counterfeiting and Plasmonic Color Applications

Plasmonic structural color originates from the scattering and absorption of visible light by metallic nanostructures. Stacks consisting of thin, disordered semicontinuous metal films are attractive plasmonic color media, as they can be mass-produced using industry-proven physical vapor deposition techniques. These films are comprised of random nano-island structures of various sizes and shapes resonating at different wavelengths. When irradiated with short-pulse lasers, the nanostructures are locally restructured, and their optical response is altered in a spectrally selective manner. Therefore, various colors are obtained. We demonstrate the generation of structural plasmonic colors through femtosecond laser modification of a thin aluminum film–isolator–metal mirror (TAFIM) structure. Laser-induced structuring of TAFIM’s top aluminum film significantly alters the sample’s specular and diffuse reflectance depending on the fluence value and the number of times a region is scanned. A “negative image” effect is possible, where a dark field observation mode image is a negative of a bright field mode image. This effect is visible using an optical microscope, the naked eye, and a digital camera. The use of self-passivating aluminum results in a long-lasting, non-fading coloration effect. The reported technique could be used in anti-counterfeiting and security applications, as well as in plasmonic color printing and macroscopic and microscopic marking for personalized fine arts and aesthetic products such as jewelry.

Delayed-focus micro-angle measurement optical system based on structural segregation

In this paper, we propose a delayed-focusing type micro-angle measurement optical system based on the Cassegrain structure (cassette structure), analyze the basic cassette structure and the Galilean laser beam expanding system, and determine the primary and secondary mirror structure as a reflective focusless system as a determining module. This focusless system emits and receives parallel light, and the light source and detector separated by the beam splitter are designed as replaceable modules. Additionally, the imaging quality of the system can be optimized, or the effect of meeting different imaging requirements can be achieved, by changing the number and type of corrective mirrors and the parameters of the specific glass elements in the replaceable modules. After the final optimization, the radius of the imaging spot of the combined mirror group can be limited to 6.1 µm; the modulation transfer function is better than 0.6 at 100 lp/mm; the difference between the meridian and the arc-vector curves is less than 0.1; and the theoretical angular accuracy reaches 0.2″. The delayed-focusing system structure is analyzed under different temperature fields to provide guidance for the design of the subsequent structure temperature control. Comparison and analysis with commonly used angle measurement optical systems are also made. It is concluded that the structure meets the requirements for use in the on-orbit environment, completes the reuse of the established structural modules, and further saves the manufacturing cost, which provides a feasible solution to the problem of monitoring the small angular changes in the field of space.

Compact structures for single-beam magneto-optical trapping of ytterbium.

At present, the best optical lattice clocks are based on the spectroscopy of trapped alkaline-earth-like atoms such as ytterbium and strontium. The development of mobile or even space-borne clocks necessitates concepts for the compact laser-cooling and trapping of these atoms with reduced laser requirements. Here, we present two compact and robust achromatic mirror structures for single-beam magneto-optical trapping of alkaline-earth-like atoms using two widely separated optical cooling frequencies. We have compared the trapping and cooling performance of a monolithic aluminum structure that generates a conventional trap geometry to a quasi-planar platform based on a periodic mirror structure for different isotopes of Yb. Compared to prior work with strontium in non-conventional traps, where only bosons were trapped on a narrow line transition, we demonstrate two-stage cooling and trapping of a fermionic alkaline-earth-like isotope in a single-beam quasi-planar structure.

Emission of quasi-monochromatic ultrasoft X-ray of multilayer target in the Bragg direction under 5.7 MeV electron irradiation

Previously, it was experimentally shown that VUV radiation generated in a periodic structure of a multilayer X-ray mirror by relativistic electrons exhibits a quasi-monochromatic spectrum depending on the angle of inclination of the target and the direction of emission of radiation inside the radiation cone. Here, we present new experimental results regarding the properties of angular density of radiation. A comparison between the measured radiation intensity over a wide range of target inclination angles and theoretical calculations is provided.

Optimal design and analysis of a space lightweight mirror with a directionally oriented 2.5D-CVT structure

Reflective mirrors are the key imaging components of space-borne telescopes, which require a high lightweight ratio integrated with excellent optical properties. In this context, a novel, to our knowledge, 2.5D centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) generation methodology is proposed for designing and optimizing a lightweight mirror structure. Firstly, the initial designs are obtained combining global sensitivity factor mapping and local distribution optimization. Then, the optimal model is selected through multi-objective optimization and decision making. Subsequently, the FEA (finite element analysis) results indicate that, under the same mass, the proposed design exhibits better optomechanical performance. Finally, in practical applications, the approach presented in this paper outperforms the traditional design for each technological requirement, including a 62% reduction in RMS and a higher lightweight ratio. This method offers a kind of novel design and optimization process for space-based optomechanical lightweight structures.

Reconfigurable water-based metamaterial with hybrid mechanism for backward-scattering reduction

A hybrid mechanism water-based metamaterial (HMWM) with polarization conversion, absorption and phase cancellation mechanisms is proposed in this paper. The absorption and polarization conversion mechanisms are integrated by combining the water layer with polarization conversion structure, and the absorption conversion rate reaches more than 90% in the dual band (4.0–4.7 GHz and 8.2–15.7 GHz). Based on the above mechanism, the phase cancellation mechanism makes use of the opposite phase between HMWM and its mirror structure for checkerboard configuration to reduce the wideband radar cross section (RCS) by 3–18 GHz, achieving wide-angle RCS reduction and polarization insensitivity. In addition, the model realizes stealth control by adjusting RCS reduction capability under different water layer conditions. The results of simulation and experiment agree well, which fully demonstrates that the HMWM has scattering suppression capability and has potential application in multifunctional metamaterial.

Deterministic Areal Enhancement of Interlayer Exciton Emission by a Plasmonic Lattice on Mirror.

The emergence of interlayer excitons (IX) in atomically thin heterostructures of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) has drawn great attention due to their unique and exotic optical and optoelectronic properties. Because of the spatially indirect nature of IX, its oscillator strength is 2 orders of magnitude smaller than that of the intralayer excitons, resulting in a relatively low photoluminescence (PL) efficiency. Here, we achieve the PL enhancement of IX by more than 2 orders of magnitude across the entire heterostructure area with a plasmonic lattice on mirror (PLoM) structure. The significant PL enhancement mainly arises from resonant coupling between the amplified electric field strength within the PLoM gap and the out-of-plane dipole moment of IX excitons, increasing the emission efficiency by a factor of around 47.5 through the Purcell effect. This mechanism is further verified by detuning the PLoM resonance frequency with respect to the IX emission energy, which is consistent with our theoretical model. Moreover, our simulation results reveal that the PLoM structure greatly alters the far-field radiation of the IX excitons preferentially to the surface normal direction, which increases the collection efficiency by a factor of around 10. Our work provides a reliable and universal method to enhance and manipulate the emission properties of the out-of-plane excitons in a deterministic way and holds great promise for boosting the development of photoelectronic devices based on the IX excitons.

Parametric optimization of rearview mirror structure based on a multi-island genetic algorithm

To quickly find the structural parameters of a particular mirror that produces the least amount of aerodynamic noise, the rearview mirror of a passenger car is taken as the research object and an optimization platform is established based on Isight software in this paper. The mirror structure is parameterized in Sculptor, and several sample models are constructed using the optimal Latin hypercube design (OLHD). Then, by simulating each sample model, the sound pressure level of the Curle source at the side window surface monitoring point was obtained. The relationship between the mirror structure and the wind noise at the point is fitted using the Kriging approximation model after the calculation is completed. Finally, the values at each point decreased when the changes at positions 1, 2, 3, and 4 were 2.5 mm, 3.91 mm, 4.5 mm, and 3.6 mm, and the sound pressure level at monitoring point 4 decreased the most, with a reduction of 3.76 dB in wind noise compared with the original model.

Climate-dependent enhancement of radiative cooling with mirror structures

Climate-dependent enhancement of radiative cooling with mirror structures

Design of planar comb-driven MEMS torsional mirror

The MEMS torsional mirror is an important MEMS optical device, and its related applications are very wide, including LiDAR, projection equipment, optical communication, and so on. At present, the electrostatically driven MEMS torsional mirror mainly adopts a vertical comb driver to achieve torsional motion, which has some disadvantages such as a complicated manufacturing process, low yield, and high driving voltage. In this paper, a novel MEMS torsional mirror structure is proposed, which provides flexible elastic constraint points for the torsional mirror with the bottom support rod structure as the center, and relies on the combination of planar comb and support rod to form a tie rod structure to achieve torsion, and achieves a torsion Angle of ±15.55° under the driving voltage of 65 V. The use of a planar comb instead of a vertical comb greatly reduces the difficulty of manufacturing. Finally, it is verified that the system stability is good, the correlation drift does not affect the results within the range, the fifth-order modes are within the reasonable range, and the maximum stress is 671 MPa, which is controlled within the range of fracture stress of silicon material.

Coherent perfect absorption of light by undoped graphene monolayer

We show theoretically that coherent perfect absorption (CPA) of light is possible by a graphene monolayer without doping. To achieve the CPA, undoped graphene is embedded inside a multilayer structure called mirror structure, which increases the effective impedance of the surrounding medium. The increased effective impedance allows the destructive interference of light outside the structure that induces an increased Joule heat generating perfect absorption of light by graphene. We find that the CPA is possible for any wavelength as long as the thickness of each layer of the structure is a quarter of the corresponding wavelength. By changing the incident wavelength, but keeping the thickness of each layer, we show that the optical absorption is sensitive to the change of the incident wavelength. Therefore, we can design a photo detector for a specific wavelength.

Weakly-Supervised Mirror Detection via Scribble Annotations

Mirror detection is of great significance for avoiding false recognition of reflected objects in computer vision tasks. Existing mirror detection frameworks usually follow a supervised setting, which relies heavily on high quality labels and suffers from poor generalization. To resolve this, we instead propose the first weakly-supervised mirror detection framework and also provide the first scribble-based mirror dataset. Specifically, we relabel 10,158 images, most of which have a labeled pixel ratio of less than 0.01 and take only about 8 seconds to label. Considering that the mirror regions usually show great scale variation, and also irregular and occluded, thus leading to issues of incomplete or over detection, we propose a local-global feature enhancement (LGFE) module to fully capture the context and details. Moreover, it is difficult to obtain basic mirror structure using scribble annotation, and the distinction between foreground (mirror) and background (non-mirror) features is not emphasized caused by mirror reflections. Therefore, we propose a foreground-aware mask attention (FAMA), integrating mirror edges and semantic features to complete mirror regions and suppressing the influence of backgrounds. Finally, to improve the robustness of the network, we propose a prototype contrast loss (PCL) to learn more general foreground features across images. Extensive experiments show that our network outperforms relevant state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods, and even some fully supervised methods. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/winter-flow/WSMD.

Theoretical Modeling and Experimental Verification of Elliptical Hyperbolic Hybrid Flexure Hinges

A flexure hinge composed of elliptical and hyperbolic hybrid configurations is developed and analyzed in this paper. The analytical models of compliance, rotation accuracy, and maximum stress of the flexure hinge are established, and the correctness of the models is validated by finite element analysis and experiments. The influence of structural parameters on compliance and rotation accuracy is discussed. The concept of compliance stress ratio is proposed to assess the deformation capacity of flexure hinges when subjected to the same stress, which provides a basis for quantitatively comparing the comprehensive performance of flexure hinges. The performance of the hybrid flexure hinge is compared with that of elliptical, hyperbolic, and circular flexure hinges by taking the compliance accuracy ratio and the compliance stress ratio as the performance evaluation indexes. The results show that the hybrid flexure hinge combines the advantages of hyperbolic and elliptical hinges and has a balanced performance in compliance, rotation accuracy, and low stress. The designed hybrid flexure hinge is suitable for the support structure of fast steering mirrors, which provides a valuable reference for the engineering optimization design of flexure hinges.

Ultrafast Spectroscopy under Vibrational Strong Coupling in Diphenylphosphoryl Azide.

Strong coupling of cavity photons and molecular vibrations creates vibrational polaritons that have been shown to modify chemical reactivity and alter material properties. While ultrafast spectroscopy of vibrational polaritons has been performed intensively in metal complexes, ultrafast dynamics in vibrationally strongly coupled organic molecules remain unexplored. Here, we report ultrafast pump-probe measurement and two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy in diphenylphosphoryl azide under vibrational strong coupling. Early time oscillatory structures indicate coherent energy exchange between the two polariton modes, which decays in ∼2 ps. We observe a large transient absorptive feature around the lower polariton, which can be explained by the overlapped excited-state absorption and derivative-shaped structures around the lower and upper polaritons. The latter feature is explained by the Rabi splitting contraction, which is ascribed to a reduced population in the ground state. These results reassure the previously reported spectroscopic theory to describe nonlinear spectroscopy of vibrational polaritons. We have also noticed the influence of the complicated layer structure of the cavity mirrors. The penetration of the electric field distribution into the layered structure of the dielectric-mirror cavities can significantly affect the Rabi splitting and the decay time constant of polaritonic systems.

Design and Optimization of a Highly Linear Power Amplifier with Novel Active Bias Circuit in InGaP/GaAs HBT MMIC Technology

This paper introduces a highly linear power amplifier (PA) that utilizes a 2-μm InGaP/GaAs hetero-junction bipolar transistor (HBT) process. As communication systems evolve in complexity, the demands for the linearity and static power consumption of HBT power amplifiers are becoming more stringent. Typically, there exists a trade-off relationship between linearity and static power consumption in the design process. Hence, this paper proposes a novel active bias circuit for HBT power amplifiers, along with its layout design. The proposed active bias circuit consists of a differential pair and a current mirror structure, designed to enhance PA linearity while maintaining low quiescent current. Additionally, a novel layout structure is implemented to achieve thermal coupling between the RF transistors and the active bias, further improving PA linearity. As a result of the implementation of the proposed active bias and layout structure, the PA demonstrates high linearity in both amplitude modulation to phase modulation (AM/PM) and amplitude modulation to amplitude modulation (AM/AM) performance, while simultaneously maintaining a low quiescent current. The three-stage PA prototype achieves notable performance metrics, including a peak gain of 32.6 dB at 5.6 GHz, gain flatness of ±0.5 dB from 5.15 GHz to 5.85 GHz, and P1dB of 32.1 dBm at a quiescent emitter current of 180 mA.

Engineered Peptides Harboring Cation Motifs Against Multidrug-Resistant Bacteria.

Multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogens pose a serious threat to the health and life of humans, necessitating the development of new antimicrobial agents. Herein, we develop and characterize a panel of nine amino acid peptides with a cation end motif. Bioactivity analysis revealed that the short peptide containing "RWWWR" as a central motif harboring mirror structure "KXR" unit displayed not only high activity against MDR planktonic bacteria but also a clearance rate of 92.33% ± 0.58% against mature biofilm. Mechanically, the target peptide (KLR) killed pathogens by excessively accumulating reactive oxygen species and physically disrupting membranes, thereby enhancing its robustness for controlling drug resistance. In the animal model of sepsis infection by MDR bacteria, the peptide KLR exhibited strong therapeutic effects. Collectively, this study provided the dominant structure of short antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) to replenish our arsenals for combating bacterial infections and illustrated what could be harnessed as a new agent for fighting MDR bacteria.

Tamm plasmon polariton-based planar hot-electron photodetector for the near-infrared region.

Light-trapping devices have always been a topic of intense interest among researchers. One such device that has gained attention is the hot-electron photodetector with a tunable detection wavelength. Photodetectors based on plasmon nanostructures that provide excitation of surface plasmon polaritons are challenging to manufacture. To address this issue, a planar hot-electron photodetector based on a Tamm plasmon polariton localized in a metal-semiconductor-multilayer mirror structure has been proposed in this study. The parameters and materials of the structure were adjusted to ensure perfect absorption at the resonance wavelength. As a result, the photoresponsivity of the proposed device can reach 42.6 mA W-1 at 905 nm. For the first time, the photosensitivity was calculated analytically by solving the dispersion law for the Tamm plasmon polariton.

Surface Analysis and Optimization of Large Aperture Mirror Supported by Elastic Expansion Sleeves

In order to meet the stability of the support structure of arrayed large aperture mirror and improve the surface accuracy of the mirror, the elastic expansion sleeve is proposed as the back-support structure of the large aperture mirror. The feasibility of the support method is verified by theoretical analysis and experiment. The PV value of additional wavefront distortion is about 75.3nm<λ/5(λ=632.8nm) when the torque of single mandrel screw is 40N·cm, which meets the technical specifications. The change trend of the support-induced surface is compared between the finite element simulation and the measured results under different mandrel screw torque conditions. When the support torque is increased in equal increments, there is a linear positive correlation between the PV value of support-induced surface and the support torque. Based on the change trend of the support-induced surface, the optimization design scheme of the initial surface is proposed. And the simulation results show that the optimized induced distortion is smaller than that of the ideal surface (the compensation ratio is 7.68%), which reduces the additional wavefront distortion under the actual mounting support.

Optimization design and analysis of double-sided integrated mirror structure

Optimization design and analysis of double-sided integrated mirror structure

Evaluation for Thermal Deformation of Large Segmented Mirror Structure Based on STOP Analysis

Evaluation for Thermal Deformation of Large Segmented Mirror Structure Based on STOP Analysis