Optical fibre nanowire sensors and applications

Optical fibre nanowires (OFN) have recently attracted increased attention because of their numerous applications in sensing and particle manipulation [1] and their extraordinary optical and mechanical properties, which include, amongst others:biocompatibility: OFNs show good compatibility with cells/ biological matter as they are made from silica.configurability/flexibility: OFN are manufactured stretching optical fibres, thus they maintain their original size at the extremities (fig. 1), allowing for prompt connection to any fiberised source/detector. robustness: OFNs are extremely strong and have a conventional fibre pigtail at their extremity, thus can be handled with tools typical of the macroscopic world.large evanescent fields: a considerable fraction of the transmitted power can propagate outside the OFN physical boundary when the OFN size is small, allowing for enhanced sensing and optical manipulation. strong confinement: when OFNs are nanostructured and metal coated, light can be confined to 50-100 nm spot sizes, allowing for nanosensing and single nanoparticle trapping/manipulation

Please Lower Small Cell Antenna Heights in 5G

In this paper, we present a new and significant theoretical discovery. If the absolute height difference between base station (BS) antenna and user equipment (UE) antenna is larger than zero, then the network capacity performance in terms of the area spectral efficiency (ASE) will continuously decrease as the BS density increases for ultra-dense (UD) small cell networks (SCNs). This performance behavior has a tremendous impact on the deployment of UD SCNs in the 5th-generation (5G) era. Network operators may invest large amounts of money in deploying more network infrastructure to only obtain an even worse network performance. Our study results reveal that it is a must to lower the SCN BS antenna height to the UE antenna height to fully achieve the capacity gains of UD SCNs in 5G. However, this requires a revolutionized approach of BS architecture and deployment, which is explored in this paper too.Comment: Final version in IEEE: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7842150/. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1608.0669