The use of Bragg scattering to increase the efficiency and control the spectrum and polarization of light from a polymer light‐emitting diode (LED) is demonstrated. A lateral wavelength‐scale microstructure in the form of a corrugation is integrated into the light‐emitting layer and used to control the lateral modes (those parallel to the light‐emitting layer) of the structure. Both photoluminescence and electroluminescence efficiencies can be enhanced in poly[2‐Methoxy‐5‐(2′‐ethyl‐hexyloxy)‐1,4‐phenylenevinylene] (MEH–PPV) based devices.

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In this paper, we intend to gain an understanding of the interaction of light with microstructures. Measurements of amplitude and phase in the diffracted field close to gratings using a heterodyne scanning probe are presented. Coherent light diffracted by microstructures produces periodic features and can give birth to phase dislocations, also called phase singularities. Phase singularities are isolated points where the amplitude of the field is zero. We present measurements of such phase singularities with 10 nm spatial sampling and compare them with theoretical results obtained from rigorous diffraction calculations. The observed polarization effects reveal also important information about the vectorial field conversion by the fiber tip.

The boundary-element method is applied to the interaction of light with resonant metallic nanoparticles. At a certain wavelength, excitation of a surface plasmon takes place, which leads to a resonantly enhanced near-field amplitude and a large scattering cross section. The resonance wavelength for different scatterer geometries is determined. Alteration of the scattering properties in the presence of other metallic nanoparticles is discussed. To treat this problem, a novel formulation of the boundary-element method is presented that solves the interaction problem for all the coupled particles.

We apply the boundary element method to the analysis of the plasmon response of systems that consist of coupled metallic nanoscatterers. For systems made of two or more objects, the response depends strongly on the individual particle behavior as well as on the separation distance and on the configuration of the particles relative to the illumination direction. By analyzing the behavior of these systems, we determine the smallest interaction distance at which the particles can be considered decoupled. We discriminate the two cases of particle systems consisting of scatterers with the same and different resonance wavelengths.