High refractive index makes silicon the optimal platform for dielectric metasurfaces capable of versatile control of light. Among various silicon modifications, its monocrystalline form has the weakest visible light absorption but requires a careful choice of the fabrication technique to avoid damage, contamination or amorphization. Presently prevailing chemical etching can shape thin silicon layers into two-dimensional patterns consisting of strips and posts with vertical walls and equal height. Here, the possibility to create silicon nanostructure of truly tree-dimensional shape by means of the focused ion beam lithography is explored, and a 300 nm thin film of monocrystalline epitaxial silicon on sapphire is patterned with a chiral nanoscale relief. It is demonstrated that exposing silicon to the ion beam causes a substantial drop of the visible transparency, which, however, is completely restored by annealing with oxidation of the damaged surface layer. As a result, the fabricated chiral metasurface combines high (50–80%) transmittance with the circular dichroism of up to 0.5 and the optical activity of up to 20° in the visible range. Being also remarkably durable, it possesses crystal-grade hardness, heat resistance up to 1000 °C and the inertness of glass.
Prospects of using metal hole arrays for the enhanced optical detection of molecular chirality in nanosize volumes are investigated. Light transmission through the holes filled with an optically active material is modeled and the activity enhancement by more than an order of magnitude is demonstrated. The spatial resolution of the chirality detection is shown to be of a few tens of nanometers. From comparing the effect in arrays of cylindrical holes and holes of complex chiral shape, it is concluded that the detection sensitivity is determined by the plasmonic near field enhancement. The intrinsic chirality of the arrays due to their shape appears to be less important.
We investigate the realization complexity of systems of Boolean functions in the class of iterative contact circuits -an extension of the class of contact circuits. The objective is to obtain so-called high-accuracy asymptotic bounds for the Shannon function L ICC (n, m), which describe the asymptotic behavior of both the Shannon function and the first residual term in its asymptotic expansion. We show that for m < 2 2 (n−1)/2 −n we have the bound L ICC (n, m) = m · 2 n−1 n + log m " 1 + 5 log(n + log m) 2(n + log m)The problem is thus solved with a fairly weak constraint on the number of functions.
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