Laser-induced periodic surface structures (LIPSS) are often present when processing solid targets with linearly polarized ultrashort laser pulses. The different irradiation parameters to produce them on metals, semiconductors and dielectrics have been studied extensively, identifying suitable regimes to tailor its properties for applications in the fields of optics, medicine, fluidics and tribology, to name a few. One important parameter widely present when exposing the samples to the high intensities provided by these laser pulses in air environment, that generally is not considered, is the formation of a superficial laser-induced oxide layer. In this paper, we fabricate LIPSS on a layer of the oxidation prone hard-coating material chromium nitride in order to investigate the impact of the laser-induced oxide layer on its formation. A variety of complementary surface analytic techniques were employed, revealing morphological, chemical and structural characteristics of well-known high-spatial frequency LIPSS (HSFL) together with a new type of low-spatial frequency LIPSS (LSFL) with an anomalous orientation parallel to the laser polarization. Based on this input, we performed finite-difference time-domain calculations considering a layered system resembling the geometry of the HSFL along with the presence of a laser-induced oxide layer. The simulations support a scenario that the new type of LSFL is formed at the interface between the laser-induced oxide layer and the non-altered material underneath. These findings suggest that LSFL structures parallel to the polarization can be easily induced in materials that are prone to oxidation.

Laser-induced modification of transparent solids by intense femtosecond laser pulses allows fast integration of nanophotonic and nanofluidic devices with controlled optical properties. Experimental observations suggest that the local and dynamic nature of the interactions between light and the transient plasma plays an important role during fabrication. Current analytical models neglect these aspects and offer limited coverage of nanograting formation on dielectric surfaces. In this paper, we present a self-consistent dynamic treatment of the plasma build-up and its interaction with light within a three-dimensional electromagnetic framework. The main finding of this work is that local light-plasma interactions are responsible for the reorientation of laser-induced periodic plasma patterns with respect to the incident light polarization, when a certain energy density threshold is reached. Plasma reconfiguration occurs within a single laser pulse, on a femtosecond time scale. Moreover, we show that the reconfigured sub-wavelength plasma structures actually grow into the bulk of the sample, which agrees with the experimental observations of self-organized volume nanogratings. We find that mode coupling of the incident and transversely scattered light with the periodic plasma structures is sufficient to initiate the growth and self-organization of the pattern inside the medium with a characteristic half-wavelength periodicity.

We investigate lasing thresholds in a representative photonic molecule composed of two coupled active cylinders of slightly different radii. Specifically, we use the recently formulated steady-state ab initio laser theory (SALT) to assess the effect of the underlying gain transition on lasing frequencies and thresholds. We find that the order in which modes lase can be modified by choosing suitable combinations of the gain center frequency and linewidth, a result that cannot be obtained using the conventional approach of quasi-bound modes. The impact of the gain transition center on the lasing frequencies, the frequency pulling effect, is also quantified.

The formation of a new type of laser-induced periodic surface structures using a femtosecond pulsed laser is studied on the basis of the Sipe-Drude theory solved with a FDTD scheme. Our numerical results indicate the possibility of coexisting structures parallel and perpendicular to the polarization of the incident light for low reduced collision frequency (γ/ω 1/4, where ω is the laser frequency). Moreover, these structures have a periodicity of Λ ∼ λ in both orientations. To explain this behavior, light-matter interaction around a single surface inhomogeneity is also studied and confirms the simultaneous presence of surface plasmon polaritons and radiation remnants in orthogonal orientations at low γ/ω values.

We study the formation and growth of laser‐induced periodic surface structures (LIPSSs) with the finite‐difference time‐domain (FDTD) method. We use a recently proposed inter‐pulse feedback method to account for the evolution of the surface morphology between each laser pulse sent to the surface of the processed material. This method has been used with an ablation‐like mechanism, by removing material exposed to a light intensity higher than a given threshold. We propose an inverse mechanism, an expansion‐like mechanism, able to grow structures that the ablation‐like process cannot. This allows us to introduce the notions of constructive and destructive feedback and explains a strong contradiction between the standard Sipe‐Drude theory and the experimental observations, i.e. the formation on metals of structures usually linked to wide band gap dielectrics. (© 2016 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

This study reports on the design of small footprint, integrated polarization filters based on engineered photonic lattices. Using a rods-in-air lattice as a basis for a TE filter and a holes-in-slab lattice for the analogous TM filter, we are able to maximize the degree of polarization of the output beams up to 98% with a transmission efficiency greater than 75%. The proposed designs allow not only for logical polarization filtering, but can also be tailored to output an arbitrary transverse beam profile. The lattice configurations are found using a recently proposed parallel tabu search algorithm for combinatorial optimization problems in integrated photonics.

Experimental and theoretical studies of laser-induced breakdown in dielectrics provide conflicting conclusions about the possibility to trigger ionization avalanche on the subpicosecond time scale and the relative importance of carrier-impact ionization over field ionization. On the one hand, current models based on a single ionizationrate equation do not account for the gradual heating of the charge carriers, which, for short laser pulses, might not be sufficient to start an avalanche. On the other hand, kinetic models based on microscopic collision probabilities have led to variable outcomes that do not necessarily match experimental observations as a whole. In this paper, we present a rate-equation model that accounts for the avalanche process phenomenologically by using an auxiliary differential equation to track the gradual heating of the charge carriers and define the collisional impact rate dynamically. The computational simplicity of this dynamical rate-equation model offers the flexibility to extract effective values from experimental data. This is demonstrated by matching the experimental scaling trends for the laser-induced damage threshold of several dielectric materials for pulse durations ranging from a few fs to a few ps. Through numerical analysis, we show that the proposed model gives results comparable to those obtained with multiple rate equations and identify potential advantages for the development of large-scale, three-dimensional electromagnetic methods for the modeling of laser-induced breakdown in transparent media.

Leddar PixSet is a new publicly available dataset (dataset.leddartech.com) for autonomous driving research and development. One key novelty of this dataset is the presence of full-waveform data from the Leddar Pixell sensor, a solid-state flash LiDAR. Full-waveform data has been shown to improve the performance of perception algorithms in airborne applications but is yet to be demonstrated for terrestrial applications such as autonomous driving. The PixSet dataset contains approximately 29k frames from 97 sequences recorded in high-density urban areas, using a set of various sensors (cameras, LiDARs, radar, IMU, etc.) Each frame has been manually annotated with 3D bounding boxes.