Presently, solar cells are covered with Ce-doped microsheet cover glasses that are attached with Dow Corning DC 93500 silicone adhesive. This general approach has been used from the beginning of space exploration, however, it is expensive and time consuming. Furthermore, as the voltage of solar arrays increases, significant arcing has occurred in solar arrays, leading to loss of satellite power. This problem could be ameliorated if the cover glass extended over the edges of the cell, but this would impact packing density. An alternative idea that might solve these issues and be less expensive and more protective is to develop a coating that could be applied over the entire array. Such a coating must be resistant to atomic oxygen for low earth orbits below about 700 km, it must be resistant to ultraviolet radiation for all earth and near-sun orbits and it must withstand the damaging effects of space radiation. Coating flexibility would be an additional advantage. We have been exploring the use of newly discovered polyoligomericsilsesquioxane (POSSreg) materials with metallic additives for these applications. This technology has several significant advantages: the glass-like composition of POSSreg provides excellent resistance to radiation and VUV and the POSS nano-building blocks can be incorporated into all known plastics using conventional polymerization or compounding techniques that can lead to tailored optically transparent materials with entirely new performance levels. We will report on the results of POSS coatings containing various additives (e.g. organic and metallic). Thick samples (150 mum) are being applied to various substrates and have been exposed to 2 MeV protons up to 10 15 P+/cm2 and UV/VUV irradiation up to 1000 hrs. The 2 MeV protons are absorbed within about 85 mum depth with ~2 mum straggle so the damage is contained entirely within the layer. Results of these tests with several POSSreg matrices will be presented
Abstract Water to cement (w/c) ratio is usually the most important parameter specified in concrete design and is sometimes the subject of dispute when a shortfall in concrete strength or durability is an issue. However, determination of w/c ratio in hardened concrete by testing is very difficult once the concrete has set. This paper presents the results from an inter-laboratory round-robin study organised by the Applied Petrography Group to evaluate and compare microscopy methods for measuring w/c ratio in hardened concrete. Five concrete prisms with w/c ratios ranging from 0.35 to 0.55, but otherwise identical in mix design were prepared independently and distributed to 11 participating petrographic laboratories across Europe. Participants used a range of methods routine to their laboratory and these are broadly divided into visual assessment, measurement of fluorescent intensity and quantitative backscattered electron microscopy. Some participants determined w/c ratio using more than one method or operator. Consequently, 100 individual w/c ratio determinations were collected, representing the largest study of its type ever undertaken. The majority (81%) of the results are accurate to within ± 0.1 of the target mix w/c ratios, 58% come to within ± 0.05 and 37% are within ± 0.025. The study shows that microscopy-based methods are more accurate and reliable compared to the BS 1881-124 physicochemical method for determining w/c ratio. The practical significance, potential sources of errors and limitations are discussed with the view to inform future applications.
Enhancement of local electromagnetic fields is instrumental for engineering of light absorption, emission, scattering, chemical reactions, and other processes. Nanostructured composites with plasmonic inclusions have been shown as promising candidates to concentrate electromagnetic waves in nanometer-sized “hot spots”. Unfortunately, majority of high-performance plasmonic structures are resonance-based, and therefore their performance is relatively narrow-band. Here we present a novel material system that has potential to realize broadband enhancement of local intensity and explain the origin of this behavior.
The proposed material platform comprises an array of aligned plasmonic cones arranged in a periodic planar lattice. From the effective medium standpoint, such structure represents a uniaxial material whose effective permittivity varies along the cone. Importantly, there exists a relatively wide range of wavelengths where one component of the effective permittivity tensor crosses zero within the composite. According to previous research, strong enhancement of local field is expected in the vicinity of epsilon-near-zero point in homogeneous materials with spatially varying permittivity, often called transitional metamaterials. We show, however, that due to strong structural nonlocality electromagnetic response of nanocone media does not follow this recipe. In fact, we demonstrate that the incoming radiation is coupled into an additional electromagnetic wave that propagates towards the tip of the cone causing a strong enhancement to the local field. We present a comprehensive description of this phenomenon.
Abstract : Nanowire metamaterials are a class of composite photonic media formed by an array of aligned plasmonic nanowires embedded in a dielectric matrix. Depending on exact composition, geometry, and excitation wavelength, nanowire structures are known to exhibit elliptical, hyperbolic, or epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) responses. In the ENZ regime, optical response of the composite becomes strongly nonlocal. Excitation of an additional wave, caused by nonlocality, has been experimentally demonstrated in nanowire-based metamaterials. In this thesis, a computational study of the nonlocal optical response in plasmonic nanowire arrays has been conducted to better understand such materials. The results of this computational study were used to develop an analytical technique that provides an adequate description of the optical response of wire based metamaterials. This formalism combines the local and nonlocal effective-medium theories often used to describe the optics of nanowire composites. It provides insight into the origin of the additional wave and allows implementation of additional boundary conditions. This approach can be straightforwardly extended to describe the optics for numerious plasmonic structures.
We present a simple numerical extension to Maxwell Garnett formalism for wire materials with high filling fractions in anisotropic unit cells to describe photonic band gap behavior observed in epitaxially grown semiconductor multilayer nanowires.
We present an analytical description of the nonlocal optical response of plasmonic nanowire metamaterials that enable negative refraction, subwavelength light manipulation, and emission lifetime engineering. We show that dispersion of optical waves propagating in nanowire media results from coupling of transverse and longitudinal electromagnetic modes supported by the composite and derive the nonlocal effective medium approximation for this dispersion. We derive the profiles of electric field across the unit cell, and use these expressions to solve the long-standing problem of additional boundary conditions in calculations of transmission and reflection of waves by nonlocal nanowire media. We verify our analytical results with numerical solutions of Maxwell's equations and discuss generalization of the developed formalism to other uniaxial metamaterials.
Light-matter interactions can be strongly modified by the surrounding environment. Here, we report on the first experimental observation of molecular spontaneous emission inside a highly non-local metamaterial based on a plasmonic nanorod assembly. We show that the emission process is dominated not only by the topology of its local effective medium dispersion, but also by the non-local response of the composite, so that metamaterials with different geometric parameters but the same local effective medium properties exhibit different Purcell factors. A record-high enhancement of a decay rate is observed, in agreement with the developed quantitative description of the Purcell effect in a non-local medium. An engineered material non-locality introduces an additional degree of freedom into quantum electrodynamics, enabling new applications in quantum information processing, photochemistry, imaging and sensing with macroscopic composites.
Nonlinear processes are at the core of many optical technologies whose further development require optimized materials suitable for nanoscale integration.Here we demonstrate the emergence of a strong bulk second-order nonlinear response in a plasmonic nanorod composite comprised of centrosymmetric materials.We develop an effective-medium description of the underlying physics, compare its predictions to the experimental results, and analyze the limits of its applicability.We demonstrate strong tunable generation of the p-polarized second-harmonic light in response to either sor p-polarized excitation.High second-harmonic enhancement is observed for fundamental frequencies in the epsilon-near-zero spectral range.The work demonstrates emergence of structurally tunable nonlinear optical response in plasmonic composites and presents a new nonlinear optical platform suitable for integrated nonlinear photonics.
We demonstrate excitation of additional electromagnetic waves in plasmonic nanorod metamaterials. These waves arising from a nonlocal optical response of metamaterial results in strongly enhanced ultrafast nonlinear response.
Recent work with polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes (POSS) modified polymers has identified several enhanced characteristics in the hybrid material, including improved radiation and atomic oxygen durability in simulated space environment and extended duration space flight test experiments. Results are summarized for simulated radiation and oxidizing environment tests on POSS modified epoxy resins polyimide and DC93-500 silicon. Preliminary tests indicate that the addition of POSS into DC93-500 improves resistance to frosting due to oxidization of the surface. Additionally the hybrid material has less surface tack and self-adhesion than the stock material providing improved handling characteristics. Additional tests indicate that the hybrid material has the same radiation tolerance as the stock material when exposed to 2MeV protons. In addition to the DC93-500, a series of epoxy polymers of various composition and formulations have been screened to identify materials suitable for usage as a cover glass replacement material on single crystal or thin film solar cells. A summary of the effects of radiation and oxidizing environment on the transmittance and durability is presented.
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