Nonlinear Self-Action of Light through Biological Suspensions

Self-Trapping of Light Using the Pancharatnam-Berry Phase

“…In such cases, a selftrapped beam preserving its shape in propagationusually called a spatial soliton or solitary wave-can be generated [35]. Regardless of the specific type of nonlinearity, light self-trapping implies a point-dependent change in the refractive index of the material, that is, the formation of light-written waveguides [31,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. Solitons in second-order nonlinear materials, substantially based upon an inhomogeneous generation of second harmonics, are a notable exception to this general rule [43].…”

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“…Researchers observed that visible lights generated by biochemical reactions could propagate efficiently in membrane-based microtubules acted as optical waveguides [10]. When passing through a chain of cyanobacteria in a suspension, lights were surprisingly found focused better as they were traveling in an optic waveguide [11]. Our recent experiments of soft material waveguides, where the lipid membrane was replaced with plastic material, showed a much higher transmission efficiency for EM waves as compared to the cases when they are propagating in pure liquid or air [12].…”

Tunable soft-matter optofluidic waveguides assembled by light

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Development of artificial materials exhibiting unusual optical properties is one of the major strands of current photonics research [1]. Of particular interest are soft-matter systems reconfigurable by external stimuli that play an important role in research fields ranging from physics to chemistry and life sciences [2][3][4][5][6][7]. Here, we prepare and study unconventional self-assembled colloidal optical waveguides (CWs) created from wavelength-size dielectric particles held together by long-range optical forces [8].

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“…On the other hand, optofluidic systems that use liquid mixtures as optical media offer widely tunable geometries and refractive index profiles adjustable through changing flow rates and/or composition of the working liquids [13,14]. Flexibility of optofluidic devices can be further increased by suspending solid dielectric or metallic micro-or nanoparticles in the working liquid, which subsequently allows the local optical response of the medium to be tuned by illumination with intense light [2][3][4][5][6][7].…”