University of Illinois

Kimani C Toussaint

Paul Vannest Braun

Placid M Ferreira

Paul Scott Carney

Lynford L Goddard

Daniel Bacon-Brown

Brynmor J Davis

William L Wilson

Brian J Roxworthy

Jinlong Zhu

Christian H Ocier

Qing Ding

Abdul Monnag Bhuiya

Corey Richards

Amy Wagoner Johnson

Chukwuemeka O Okoro

Santosh Tripathi

A device includes an optic in an at least partially rigid scaffold. The scaffold is permeated, at least temporarily during a writing process, by writable media. The optic may be written into a writable volume in the scaffold defined by the writable media. The optic may be written by exposing the writable media to incident light to cause a material property change in the writable media within the writable volume.

Volumetric optical integrated circuits

The disclosure is directed to a method and apparatus for performing patterned microscopy. The method includes obtaining a microscopy image of an object based on optical signal from the object in response to a first incoming optical beam; and obtaining a contrast-enhancing image based on optical signal from the object in response to a second incoming optical beam. The method also includes generating a patterned mask based on the contrast-enhancing image. The method further includes applying the patterned mask on the microscopy image to obtain a patterned microscopy image. The microscopy image includes a polarization-analyzed reflection confocal microscopy image. The contrast-enhancing image includes a second-harmonic generation microscopy image. The patterned microscopy image includes a second-harmonic patterned polarization-analyzed reflection confocal microscopy image.

Second-harmonic patterned polarization-analyzed reflection confocal microscope

A pillar-nanoantenna array structure is fabricated with a substrate to which pairs of pillars are coupled, where the pillars are characterized either by a thermal conductance less than 0.1 &#x3bc;W/deg or by transparency and a height exceeding thickness by at least a factor of two. Metallic caps atop a neighboring pair of pillars are separated by no more than 50 nm. An image-capture structure may be formed by modifying reflectance of a portion of the structure by heating of the portion by electromagnetic radiation. The array may be plastically deformed by raster scanning an electron beam across the array, exciting plasmon modes in the conducting particles thereby inducing a gradient force between neighboring conducting particles, and deforming neighboring pillars in such a manner as to vary the spacing separating neighboring conducting particles. A technique of plasmon-assisted etching provides for fabricating specified planar pattern of metal outside a cleanroom environment.

Bowtie nanoantennas and methods of using the same

Methods and apparatus for characterizing a sample in situ as to both its mechanical and optical characteristics. The apparatus comprises a reflective microscope with a concave primary mirror and a convex secondary mirror sharing a common optical axis, and an actuator vignetted by the convex secondary mirror for applying a force to a nanoprobe in a direction having a component along the common optical axis. The apparatus may addition include a source for generating an illuminating beam, a detector, and a processor for forming an image based on a signal provided by the detector.

Nanoindenter multimodal microscope objective for mechanobiology

A coherent confocal microscope and methods for measuring elements of the non-linear susceptibility of a nanoparticle, including, more particularly, all of the elements of the second-order susceptibility tensor of a single nanoparticle under permutation and Kleinman symmetry. Using a high numerical aperture lens, two-dimensional scanning and a vector beam shaper, the second-order nonlinear susceptibility is derived from a single confocal image. A forward model for the problem is presented and a computationally efficient data processing method robustly solves the inverse problem.

Second-order nonlinear susceptibility of a nanoparticle using coherent confocal microscopy

Growing community of inventors

Champaign, IL, United States of America

Kimani C Toussaint