In recent years, sensing and communication applications have fueled important developments of group-IV photonics in the mid-infrared band. In the long-wave range, most platforms are based on germanium, which is transparent up to ∼15-µm wavelength. However, those platforms are limited by the intrinsic losses of complementary materials or require complex fabrication processes. To overcome these limitations, we propose suspended germanium waveguides with a subwavelength metamaterial lateral cladding that simultaneously provides optical confinement and allows structural suspension. These all-germanium waveguides can be fabricated in one dry and one wet etch step. A propagation loss of 5.3 dB/cm is measured at a wavelength of 7.7 µm. These results open the door for the development of integrated devices that can be fabricated in a simple manner and can potentially cover the mid-infrared band up to ∼15 µm.Passive daytime radiative cooling has recently become an attractive approach to address the global energy demand associated with modern refrigeration technologies. One technique to increase the radiative cooling performance is to engineer the surface of a polar dielectric material to enhance its emittance at wavelengths in the atmospheric infrared transparency window (8-13 µm) by outcoupling surface-phonon polaritons (SPhPs) into free-space. Here we present a theoretical investigation of new surface morphologies based upon self-assembled silica photonic crystals (PCs) using an in-house built rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA) code. Simulations predict that silica micro-sphere PCs can reach up to 73 K below ambient temperature, when solar absorption and conductive/convective losses can be neglected. Micro-shell structures are studied to explore the direct outcoupling of the SPhP, resulting in near-unity emittance between 8 and 10 µm. Additionally, the effect of material composition is explored by simulating soda-lime glass micro-shells, which, in turn, exhibit a temperature reduction of 61 K below ambient temperature. The RCWA code was compared to FTIR measurements of silica micro-spheres, self-assembled on microscope slides.The transition dipole moment (TDM) orientation in the emission layer (EML) of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have attracted increasing attention from many researchers. But the study point at the molecular orientation in the hole transport layer (HTL) and electron transport layer (ETL) was not reported widely. In this paper, the molecular orientation of HTLs and ETLs were controlled by the deposition rate. The angle-dependent PL spectra and the variable angle spectroscopic ellipsometry (VASE) were used for evaluating the molecular orientation of B3PYMPM and TAPC, respectively. We found that fast deposition rate can boost preferentially vertical molecular orientation in both molecules and facilitate the hole and electron mobility, which was tested by the current density-voltage and capacitance-voltage curves of HODs and EODs. Moreover, the HTLs and ETLs were employed in OLED devices to verify the influence of molecular orientation on charge carrier mobility, which determined the performance of OLEDs significantly.Owing to the increasing demand for information transmission, the information capacity of free-space optical communications must be increased without being significantly affected by turbulence. Herein, based on a radially-polarized vector field array, analytical formulae for three parameters are derived average intensity, degree of polarization, and local states of polarization (SoPs). Propagation properties varying with propagation distance, strength of turbulence, beam waist, and beamlet number are investigated. In particular, the results show that the sign of local SoPs on different receiver planes is consistent with that of the source field, and that the SoPs remain constant at specific locations as the propagation distance increases; hence, the effect of turbulence on local SoPs is slight. Meanwhile, three different SoPs, i.e., linear, right-handed, and left-handed rotation polarizations, appear at corresponding locations, thereby enabling the channel capacity to be increased. This study may not only provide a theoretical basis for vector beam array propagation in a turbulent environment, but also propose a feasible solution for increasing the channel capacity and reliability to overcome challenges in a free-space link.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/nms-p937-nms1286937.html  Additionally, this study may benefit potential applications in laser lidar and remote sensing.This paper proposes optical carrier microwave interferometry (OCMI)-based optical fiber interferometers for sensing applications with improved measurement sensitivity with the assistance of the Vernier effect. Fabry-Perot interferometers (FPIs) are employed in the proof of concept. A single-FPI-OCMI system is first demonstrated for measurements of variations of temperatures by tracking the spectral shift of the interferogram in microwave domain. By cascading two FPIs with slightly different optical lengths, the Vernier effect is generated in the magnitude spectrum of the system with a typical amplitude-modulated signal. By tracking the shift of the envelope signal, temperature measurements are experimentally demonstrated with greatly enhanced sensitivity. The amplification factor for the measurement sensitivity can be easily adjusted by varying the length ratio of the two cascaded FPIs. In addition to the experimental demonstration, a complete mathematical model of the FPI-OCMI system and the mechanism for the amplified sensitivity due to Vernier effect is presented. Numerical calculations are also performed to verify the analytical derivations.The description of deformable mirror (DM) surface, which is usually a complex freeform surface, affects the measurement speed and accuracy in a real-time interferometric measurement system with a DM as the dynamic compensator. We propose an accurate and fast description method with automatically configurable Gaussian radial basis function. The distribution and shape factors of GRBFs are related to the complexity of the surface with sufficient flexibility to improve the accuracy, and the fitting results are automatically obtained using a traversal optimization algorithm, which can improve the fitting speed by reducing the number of time-consuming calculations. The feasibility is verified by numerical and practical experiment.