USA As Represented by Secretary of the Navy

James Peter Long

Joshua D Caldwell

Orest J Glembocki

Jeffrey C Owrutsky

Banahalli R Ratna

Ronald J Tonucci

Jinny Lin Liu

William R Hunter

Carissa M Soto

Ronald W Rendell

Amy S Blum

Michael A Bruckman

Optical devices that include one or more structures fabricated from polar-dielectric materials that exhibit surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs), where the SPhPs alter the optical properties of the structure. The optical properties lent to these structures by the SPhPs are altered by introducing charge carriers directly into the structures. The carriers can be introduced into these structures, and the carrier concentration thereby controlled, through optical pumping or the application of an appropriate electrical bias.

Actively tunable polar-dielectric optical devices

Protein scaffolds from tobacco mosaic virus coat protein modified to incorporate polyhistidine can bind to a metal or a dye while having improved self-assembly characteristics. The scaffold can take the form of tubes or disks, and can further be formed into dual plasmonic ring resonators. Such self-assembled structures provide useful optical properties.

Metamaterial optical elements self-assembled on protein scaffolds

A thin film reflecting interference filter (RIF) is designed to suppress unwanted harmonics thereby improving the monochromaticity of the radiation. An interference layer of material which has a well-defined plasma oscillation is deposited on a substrate and a mismatch layer is formed thereon. This interference layer exploits the interference between wavefronts reflected from the layer-substrate and the vacuum-layer interfaces to suppress higher order harmonics, while allowing good reflectance at the fundamental wavelength. This is achieved by positioning the RIF in the radiation at an angle of incidence which is greater than the critical angle of the desired fundamental wavelength, but less than critical angles of the harmonics to be suppressed. The mismatch layer increases the reflectance of the unwanted harmonics at the vacuum-layer interface, thus allowing more complete destructive interference of the unwanted harmonics. The RIF can be tuned by altering the thickness of the layer, the composition of the layer and/or the angle of incidence of the radiation.

Discrete vacuum ultra violet reflective interference filter

Growing community of inventors

Accokeek, MD, United States of America

James Peter Long