Probability density optical tomography of confined quasiparticles in a semiconductor microcavity

We present the optical tomography of the probability density of quasiparticles, the microcavity polaritons, confined in three dimensions by cylindrical traps. Collecting the photoluminescence emitted by the quasimodes under continuous nonresonant laser excitation, we reconstruct a three-dimensional mapping of the photoluminescence, from which we can extract the spatial distribution of the confined states at any energy. We discuss the impact of the confinement geometry on the wave function patterns and give an intuitive understanding in terms of a light-matter quasiparticle confined in a box

Probability density tomography of microcavity polaritons confined in cylindrical traps of various sizes

We present the optical tomography of the probability density of microcavity polaritons, confined in three dimensions by cylindrical traps of various sizes. Collecting the photoluminescence emitted by the quasimodes under continuous nonresonant laser excitation, we reconstruct a three dimensional mapping of the photoluminescence, from which we can extract the spatial distribution of the confined states at any energy. We discuss the impact of the confinement shape and size on the probability density patterns

A sweetpotato gene index established by de novo assembly of pyrosequencing and Sanger sequences and mining for gene-based microsatellite markers

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Sweetpotato (<it>Ipomoea batatas </it>(L.) Lam.), a hexaploid outcrossing crop, is an important staple and food security crop in developing countries in Africa and Asia. The availability of genomic resources for sweetpotato is in striking contrast to its importance for human nutrition. Previously existing sequence data were restricted to around 22,000 expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences and ~ 1,500 GenBank sequences. We have used 454 pyrosequencing to augment the available gene sequence information to enhance functional genomics and marker design for this plant species.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Two quarter 454 pyrosequencing runs used two normalized cDNA collections from stems and leaves from drought-stressed sweetpotato clone <it>Tanzania </it>and yielded 524,209 reads, which were assembled together with 22,094 publically available expressed sequence tags into 31,685 sets of overlapping DNA segments and 34,733 unassembled sequences. Blastx comparisons with the UniRef100 database allowed annotation of 23,957 contigs and 15,342 singletons resulting in 24,657 putatively unique genes. Further, 27,119 sequences had no match to protein sequences of UniRef100database. On the basis of this gene index, we have identified 1,661 gene-based microsatellite sequences, of which 223 were selected for testing and 195 were successfully amplified in a test panel of 6 hexaploid (<it>I. batatas</it>) and 2 diploid (<it>I. trifida</it>) accessions.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The sweetpotato gene index is a useful source for functionally annotated sweetpotato gene sequences that contains three times more gene sequence information for sweetpotato than previous EST assemblies. A searchable version of the gene index, including a blastn function, is available at <url>http://www.cipotato.org/sweetpotato_gene_index</url>.</p

A surface phase transition of supported gold nanoparticles

A thermal phase transition has been resolved in gold nanoparticles supported on a surface. By use of asynchronous optical sampling with coupled femtosecond oscillators, the Lamb vibrational modes could be resolved as a function of annealing temperature. At a temperature of 104 °C the damping rate and phase changes abruptly, indicating a structural transition in the particle, which is explained as the onset of surface melting

Polariton based all-optical spin device

An all-optical spin device is based on spin multistability of trapped microactivity polaritons

Ultrafast time-domain spectroscopy based on high-speed asynchronous optical sampling

High-speed asynchronous optical sampling (ASOPS) is a novel technique for ultrafast time-domain spectroscopy (TDS). It employs two mode-locked femtosecond oscillators operating at a fixed repetition frequency difference as sources of pump and probe pulses. We present a system where the 1 GHz pulse repetition frequencies of two Ti:sapphire oscillators are linked at an offset of ΔfR=10 kHz. As a result, their relative time delay is repetitively ramped from zero to 1 ns within a scan time of 100 µs. Mechanical delay scanners common to conventional TDS systems are eliminated, thus systematic errors due to beam pointing instabilities and spot size variations are avoided when long time delays are scanned. Owing to the multikilohertz scan-rate, high-speed ASOPS permits data acquisition speeds impossible with conventional schemes. Within only 1 s of data acquisition time, a signal resolution of 6×10−7 is achieved for optical pump-probe spectroscopy over a time-delay window of 1 ns. When applied to terahertz TDS, the same acquisition time yields high-resolution terahertz spectra with 37 dB signal-to-noise ratio under nitrogen purging of the spectrometer. Spectra with 57 dB are obtained within 2 min. A new approach to perform the offset lock between the two femtosecond oscillators in a master-slave configuration using a frequency shifter at the third harmonic of the pulse repetition frequency is employed. This approach permits an unprecedented time-delay resolution of better than 160 fs. High-speed ASOPS provides the functionality of an all-optical oscilloscope with a bandwidth in excess of 3000 GHz and with 1 GHz frequency resolution

Influence of a nonradiative reservoir on polariton spin multistability

International audienceIn this work, we study the influence of the excitation conditions on power-dependent spin switching and spin multistability of exciton polaritons in planar semiconductor microcavities. We obtain experimental evidence for the influence of a reservoir of nonradiative states which make a determining contribution to the dynamics of polaritons. While the spinor Gross-Pitaevskii equation (SGPE) fails in reproducing some critical experimental trends, an extended set of equations including a nonradiative reservoir allows us to reproduce the experiments quantitatively. We find that the energy renormalization of the exciton field due to the reservoir is crucial to describe power-dependent spin switching. The reservoir is also responsible for the effective repulsive interactions between polaritons of opposite spin obtained in the framework of the SGPE. Two important parameters, the coupling of the spinor polariton fields to the reservoir and the decay of the reservoir, are determined experimentally. We present indications that the reservoir originates from the formation of biexcitons and is constituted of localized exciton states

Coherent acoustic phonons in nanostructures investigated by asynchronous optical sampling

A new optical pump-probe technique is implemented for the investigation of acoustic phonon dynamics in the GHz to THz frequency range which is based on two asynchronously linked femtosecond lasers. Asynchronous optical sampling (ASOPS) provides the performance of on all-optical oscilloscope and allows us to record optically induced lattice dynamics over nanosecond times with 200 femtoseconds resolution at scan rates of 10 kHz. The generation of coherent acoustic phonons and their propagation and decay dynamics are investigated in semiconductor heterostructures, layered nanoscale materials of relevance for microelectronics, and X-ray mirrors. Changes of the optical properties of tailored semiconductor heterostructures associated with coherent phonon dynamics open the pathway for the modulation of optical signals at up to THz frequencies