Bone has a sophisticated architecture characterized by a hierarchical organization, starting at the sub-micrometre level. Thus, the analysis of the mechanical and structural properties of bone at ...this scale is essential to understand the relationship between its physiology, physical properties and chemical composition. Here, we unveil the potential of Brillouin-Raman microspectroscopy (BRaMS), an emerging correlative optical approach that can simultaneously assess bone mechanics and chemistry with micrometric resolution. Correlative hyperspectral imaging, performed on a human diaphyseal ring, reveals a complex microarchitecture that is reflected in extremely rich and informative spectra. An innovative method for mechanical properties analysis is proposed, mapping the intermixing of soft and hard tissue areas and revealing the coexistence of regions involved in remodelling processes, nutrient transportation and structural support. The mineralized regions appear elastically inhomogeneous, resembling the pattern of the osteons' lamellae, while Raman and energy-dispersive X-ray images through scanning electron microscopy show an overall uniform distribution of the mineral content, suggesting that other structural factors are responsible for lamellar micromechanical heterogeneity. These results, besides giving an important insight into cortical bone tissue properties, highlight the potential of BRaMS to access the origin of anisotropic mechanical properties, which are almost ubiquitous in other biological tissues.
We measure a dephasing time of several hundred picoseconds at low temperature in the ground-state transition of strongly confined InGaAs quantum dots, using a highly sensitive four-wave mixing ...technique. Between 7 and 100 K the polarization decay has two distinct components resulting in a non-Lorentzian line shape with a lifetime-limited zero-phonon line and a broadband from elastic exciton-acoustic phonon interactions.
Giant unilamellar vesicles are a widely utilized model membrane system, providing free-standing bilayers unaffected by support-induced artifacts. To measure the lamellarity of such vesicles, ...fluorescence microscopy is one commonly utilized technique, but it has the inherent disadvantages of requiring lipid staining, thereby affecting the intrinsic physical and chemical properties of the vesicles, and it requires a calibration by statistical analysis of a vesicle ensemble. Herein we present what we believe to be a novel label-free optical method to determine the lamellarity of giant vesicles based on quantitative differential interference contrast (qDIC) microscopy. The method is validated by comparison with fluorescence microscopy on a statistically significant number of vesicles, showing correlated quantization of the lamellarity. Importantly, qDIC requires neither sample-dependent calibration nor sample staining, and thus can measure the lamellarity of any giant vesicle without additional preparation or interference with subsequent investigations. Furthermore, qDIC requires only a microscope equipped with differential interference contrast and a digital camera.
We report systematic measurements of the linewidth enhancement factor (LEF) in an electrically pumped InGaAs quantum-dot (QD) amplifier in the temperature range from 50 K to room temperature. At ...injection currents below transparency, the value of the linewidth enhancement factor of the ground-state interband (excitonic) transition is between 0.4 and 1, and increases with increasing carrier density. Additionally, we investigate the spectral dependence of the LEF by tuning the wavelength of our optical probe from below resonance with the ground state of the QDs up to resonance with the first optically active excited-state transition. We find a decrease of the LEF with increasing photon energy at all investigated temperatures.
We have measured the exciton dephasing time in InAs/GaAs quantum dot molecules having different interdot barrier thicknesses in the temperature range from 5 to 60 K, using a highly sensitive ...four-wave mixing heterodyne technique. At 5 K dephasing times of several hundred picoseconds are found. Moreover, a systematic dependence of the dephasing dynamics on the barrier thickness is observed. These results show how the quantum-mechanical coupling of the electronic wave functions in the molecules affects both the exciton radiative lifetime and the exciton-acoustic phonon interaction.
The ultrafast dynamics of gain and refractive index in an electrically pumped InAs-InGaAs quantum-dot (QD) optical amplifier are measured at room temperature using differential transmission with ...femtosecond time resolution. Both absorption and gain regions are investigated. While the absorption bleaching recovery occurs on a picosecond time scale, the gain compression recovers with /spl sim/100-fs time constant, making devices based on such dots promising for high-speed optical communications.
The ultrafast gain and index dynamics in a set of InAs-InGaAs-GaAs quantum-dot (QD) amplifiers are measured at room temperature with femtosecond resolution. The role of spectral hole-burning (SHB) ...and carrier heating (CH) in the recovery of gain compression is investigated in detail. An ultrafast recovery of the spectral hole within /spl sim/100 fs is measured, comparable to bulk and quantum-well amplifiers, which is contradicting a carrier relaxation bottleneck in electrically pumped QD devices. The CH dynamics in the QD is quantitatively compared with results on an InGaAsP bulk amplifier. Reduced CH for both gain and refractive index dynamics of the QD devices is found, which is a promising prerequisite for high-speed applications. This reduction is attributed to reduced free-carrier absorption-induced heating caused by the small carrier density necessary to provide amplification in these low-dimensional systems.
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