Large area uniform nanostructures fabricated by direct femtosecond laser ablation

An approach for fabricating large area uniform nanostructures by direct femtosecond (fs) laser ablation is presented. By the simple scanning technique with appropriate irradiation conditions, arbitrary size of uniform, complanate nano-grating, nano-particle, and nano-square structures can be produced on wide bandgap materials as well as graphite. The feature sizes of the formed nanostructures, which can be tuned in a wide range by varying the irradiation wavelength, is about 200 nm with 800 nm fs laser irradiation. The physical properties of the nano-structured surfaces are changed greatly, especially the optical property, which is demonstrated by the extraordinary enhancement of light transmission of the treated area. This technique is efficient, universal, and environmentally friendly, which exhibits great potential for applications in photoelectron devices. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America

Formation mechanisms of uniform arrays of periodic nanoparticles and nanoripples on 6H-SiC crystal surface induced by femtosecond laser ablation

Uniform arrays of periodic nanoparticles with 80-nm period are formed on 6H-SiC crystal irradiated by circularly polarized 400-nm femtosecond laser pulses. In order to understand the formation mechanism, the morphology evolvement as a function of laser pulse energy and number is studied. Periodic nanoripples are also formed on the sample surface irradiated by linearly polarized 400-, 510- and 800-nm femtosecond laser pulses. All these results support well the mechanism that second-harmonic generation plays an important role in the formation of periodic nanostructures.

A uniform 290 nm periodic square structure on ZnO fabricated by two-beam femtosecond laser ablation

A uniform submicron periodic square structure was fabricated on the surface of ZnO by a technique of two linearly polarized femtosecond laser beams with orthogonal polarizations ablating material alternately. The formed two-dimensional ordering submicron structure consists of close-packed submicron squares with a spacial periodicity of 290 nm, which arises from the intercrossing of two orthogonal submicron ripple structures induced by the two beams respectively. The result demonstrates a noninterference effect of two-beam ablation based on the alternate technique, which should come from the polarization-dependent enhancement of the subwavelength ripple structure and the large interval of two alternate pulses. This two-beam alternate ablation technique is expected to open up prospects for the submicron fabrication of wide-bandgap materials.

The Uniform World Model: A Methodology for Predicting the Health Impacts of Air Pollution

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Two-dimensional performance of uniform irradiation with the use of an edge-softened lens array and spectral dispersion

A lens array composed of edge-softened elements is used to improve on-target irradiation uniformity in the Shenguang II Laser Facility, with which a Fresnel pattern of suppressed diffraction peaks is obtained. Additional uniformity can be reached by reducing short-wavelength interference speckles inside the pattern when the technique of smoothing by spectral dispersion is also used. Two-dimensional performance of irradiation is simulated and the results indicate that a pattern of steeper edges and a flat top can be achieved with this joint technique. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.

A uniform phase representation for the harmonic model in speech synthesis applications

Feature-based vocoders, e.g., STRAIGHT, offer a way to manipulate the perceived characteristics of the speech signal in speech transformation and synthesis. For the harmonic model, which provide excellent perceived quality, features for the amplitude parameters already exist (e.g., Line Spectral Frequencies (LSF), Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC)). However, because of the wrapping of the phase parameters, phase features are more difficult to design. To randomize the phase of the harmonic model during synthesis, a voicing feature is commonly used, which distinguishes voiced and unvoiced segments. However, voice production allows smooth transitions between voiced/unvoiced states which makes voicing segmentation sometimes tricky to estimate. In this article, two-phase features are suggested to represent the phase of the harmonic model in a uniform way, without voicing decision. The synthesis quality of the resulting vocoder has been evaluated, using subjective listening tests, in the context of resynthesis, pitch scaling, and Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based synthesis. The experiments show that the suggested signal model is comparable to STRAIGHT or even better in some scenarios. They also reveal some limitations of the harmonic framework itself in the case of high fundamental frequencies.

Laser tunable Toraldo superresolution with a uniform nonlinear pupil filter

We demonstrate that it is possible to reduce the focal spot size by inserting a uniform nonlinear thin film at the aperture of a focusing lens. The reduction of spot size is tunable by adjusting the incoming laser power. In comparison with the original diffraction spot, the transverse spot size can be reduced 0.65 times. The nonlinear thin film acts effectively as a Toraldo filter, and the phase and amplitude modulation stems from the laser-induced variances in the transmission of the thin film. The proposed technique removes the need of fabricating annular pupil filters. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America.

Comparison of uniform amplitude beam and intercepted Gaussian beam superresolution theories

The general superresolution theories for uniform amplitude beams and intercepted Gaussian beams are investigated. For these two types of incident beam, both two-zone amplitude and pure-phase filters are adopted to provide specific numerical descriptions of their differences in superresolution performances. Simulated results of comparisons between their performances indicate that, with the same spot size ratio, the intercepted Gaussian beam achieves a higher central image brightness ratio and significantly lower side-lobe effect irrespective of the filter used. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Microwave absorption properties of permalloy nanodots in the vortex and quasi-uniform magnetization states

When the in-plane bias magnetic field acting on a flat circular magnetic dot is smaller than the saturation field, there are two stable competing magnetization configurations of the dot: the vortex and the quasi-uniform (C-state). We measured microwave absorption properties in an array of non-interacting permalloy dots in the frequency range 1-8 GHz when the in-plane bias magnetic field was varied in the region of the dot magnetization state bi-stability. We found that the microwave absorption properties in the vortex and quasi-uniform stable states are substantially different, so that switching between these states in a fixed bias field can be used for the development of reconfigurable microwave magnetic materials.