Optical fibers utilize nonlinear effects to help transmit soliton or near soliton pulses in a variety of contexts including optical communication systems and fiber lasers. Fiber lasers produce ultra-short pulses, down to a few femtoseconds in duration, via a process called mode-locking where modes of the optical cavity are synchronized...
Nano-scale materials possess many unique physical and chemical properties which are not found in bulk materials. The ability to synthesize these materials by design is one of the greatest challenges in materials science. Advances towards meeting this challenge will lead to discoveries in fields such as plasmonics, photonics, catalysis, and...
Polymers and polyelectrolytes are ideal tools for the development of novel self-assembled materials. The ability to control the length-scales of self-assembly, and thus the properties, for soft materials lies in the understanding and subsequent manipulation of competing intermolecular interactions, such as hydrophobicity, hydrogen bonding, van der Waals, electrostatics. In this...