In this work we investigate new degrees of freedom in controlling the physical properties of structured photo-sensitive materials that can be usefully exploited in many application fields. We employ azopolymers, a class of light responsive materials, which are structured in micro-pillar array. A reversible and controlled change in morphology of a pre-patterned polymeric film under properly polarized illumination is demonstrated to provide the opportunity to engineer surface structures and dynamically tune their properties. We exploit the laser process taking advantage of the light-induced deformation of a micro-textured azopolymeric film in order to modify the surface hydrophobicity along specific direction.
For high quality optical coatings the knowledge of the losses of the deposited materials is essential. A precise measurement of low Im(n+iκ)≤ 10-6 at an intended operation wavelength and with low intensity can be achieved in waveguide configurations, whereby leaky waveguide configurations allow one to analyze losses of high- and low-index media of H-L-stacks as well due to resonances in the angle-dependent reflection curve. Numerical investigations reveal that different leaky wave schemes, e.g. Bragg-, Bloch- and Antiresonant-Reflecting waveguides, comply differently with practical requests. Loss figure evaluation requires peculiar attention due to measurement accuracy and ambiguities, thus suitable constraints for layer data and a proper merit-function construction have to be used.
Bloch surface waves (BSW) propagating at the boundary of truncated photonic crystals (1D-PC) have emerged as an attractive approach for label-free sensing in plasmon-like sensor configurations. Due to the very low losses in such dielectric thin film stacks, BSW feature very low angular resonance widths compared to the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) case. Besides label-free operation, the large field enhancement and the absence of quenching allow utilizing BSW coupled fluorescence detection to additionally sense the presence of fluorescent labels. This approach can be adapted to the case of angularly resolved resonance detection, thus giving rise to a combined label-free / labelled biosensor platform. It features a parallel analysis of multiple spots arranged as a one-dimensional array inside a microfluidic channel of a disposable chip. Application of such a combined biosensing approach to the detection of the Angiopoietin-2 cancer biomarker in buffer solutions is reported.
Optical sensors exploiting Bloch surface waves at the truncation edge of one dimensional photonic crystals are used here as a valid alternative to surface plasmon resonance operating in the Kretschmann-Raether configuration, and commonly adopted for label-free optical biosensing. In order to reduce the Bloch surface waves resonance width and increase the resolution it is desirable to work with one dimensional photonic crystals with as small losses as possible. However this makes that the resonances observed in a single polarization reflection scheme are shallow and difficult to track in a sensing experiment. Here we report on the practical implementation of an angularly resolved ellipsometric optical sensing scheme based on Bloch surface waves sustained by tantalia/silica multilayers. The angular resolution is obtained by a focused illumination at fixed wavelength and detecting the angular reflectance spectrum by means of a CMOS array detector. The experimental results, obtained by using one tantalia/silica multilayer with a defined structure, show that the limit of detection can be pushed below 2.1x10-7RIU/Hz1/2.
Bloch surface waves (BSW) propagating at the surface of truncated, one-dimensional crystals are valid candidates to improve sensors based on surface plasmon polaritons, usually referred to as surface plasmon resonance (SPR). The low losses introduced by the dielectric BSW stacks enable to achieve resonance widths much below the ones of SPR, thus proposing improved sensing results. A simplified, bi-linear model of the resonance intensity distribution is applied to estimate the effect of the resonance properties onto the measurement noise. This yields a limit of detection (LoD) that is used to optimize a BSW supporting thin film stack and to quantitatively compare SPR and BSW sensors. The results indicate that an order of magnitude reduction of the LoD is within reach when sufficient sampling of narrow BSW resonances is achieved.
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