This is a list of reviewers who served the Journal of Nanophotonics in 2019.

Within the formalism of the effective mass approximation, the Schrodinger equation is solved using a Hass variational method for a cubical GaAs/GaAlAs core/shell quantum dot. The impact actuated by the outside electric field, the hydrostatic pressure, the donor impurity off-center, and on-center effect, as well as the confinement geometric on the diamagnetic susceptibility, the polarizability, and the photoionization cross section (PCS), has been analyzed, taking into account the effect of the interaction electro–phonon (e–p). Our numerical results reveal that all of these principal parameters are very subject to the core and shell width. In addition, the impurity position and the electric field have a significant effect on the PCS without hydrostatic influence, especially when the impurity is situated at the center, and the situation becomes less significant in the boundaries of the system. On the other hand, it is found that the impact of both e–p interaction and hydrostatic influence causes a blueshift of the PCS. Interestingly, the polaronic effect is enhanced with the decreasing of the inner quantum dot width.

A new kind of super-high-intensity nano-emitting pixel, essentially adapted for augmented and virtual reality display applications, has been developed and simulated. In such a device, the pixels’ resolution is critical in order to offer a valuable use for military, professional, or consumer applications.

We propose, simulate, and achieve a method of realization of all-optical reversible logic gates based on nanoring dielectric-metal-dielectric plasmonic waveguides at 1550 nm and in the same structure. Finite-element method was used to study and simulate the proposed plasmonic reversible logic gates. These reversible logic gates are wire, NOT, swap, and Feynman. The working principle of the proposed reversible gates is based on the interferences (destructive or constructive) between the light that propagates in the input signal port(s) and control signal port(s). The threshold value of transmission between OFF and ON states is proposed as 0.4. Finally, the designed area of the proposed structure is very small (300  nm  ×  460  nm). These plasmonic reversible gates can contribute in construction of nanophotonic reversible logic circuits and all-optical quantum computing.

In the seed-mediated growth process of Au nanostructures, the uniformity and structures of the ultrafine seeds determine the purity and structures of the final Au products. Based on the highly shape-dependent surface plasmon resonance properties of Au nanostructures, we present the structures and structural transformation of Au seeds that have overgrown into Au nanostructures. The optical spectra and transmission electron microscopy images of the final product reflected that structures of the ultrafine seed are sensitive to the temperature and surfactants. It is found that the single-twinned Au seeds obtained at 30°C will transform into fivefold-twinned crystals at 90°C, which subsequently grow into Au nanobipyramids with a high surface plasmon resonance quality factor. The introduction of sodium citrate is beneficial for the formation of twinned crystal seeds. Hexadecyltrimethylammonium chloride can be used to keep the size of seeds small enough to allow Ostwald ripening at the initial heat treatment stage.

Controlling light with subwavelength-designed metasurfaces (MSs) has allowed for the arbitrary creation of structured light by precisely engineered matter. We report on the purity and conversion efficiency of hybrid orbital angular momentum (OAM)-generating MSs. We use a recently reported method to design and fabricate meta-surfaces that exploit generalized spin-orbit coupling to produce vector OAM states with asymmetric OAM superpositions, e.g., 1 and 5, coupled to linear and circular polarization states, fractional vector OAM states with OAM values of 3.5 and 6.5, and also the common conjugate spin and OAM of ±1 as reported in previous spin-orbit coupling devices. The OAM and radial modes in the resulting beams are quantitatively studied by implementing a modal decomposition approach, establishing both purity and conversion efficiency. We find conversion efficiencies exceeding 75% and purities in excess of 95%. A phase-flattening approach reveals that the OAM purity can be very low due to the presence of undesired radial components. We characterize the effect and illustrate how to suppress the undesired radial modes.

A rhombus-shaped holes-based photonic sensor is proposed and analyzed using the finite-difference time-domain method embedded in the commercial simulator RSoft. By changing the refractive indices in the biosensor under testing, the transmission properties of light are changed according to the changes in glucose concentrations. Various sensitivities are obtained and given as 604.5, 589.91, 537.86, and 520.5  nm  /  RIU, corresponding to both quality (Q) factors as high as 4.414  ×  10⁵, 2.1  ×  10⁵, 8.34  ×  10⁵, and 3.247  ×  10⁶ and a detection limit of 5.89  ×  10^−  7, 1.27  ×  10^−  6, 3.44  ×  10^−  7, and 8.99  ×  10^−  8, respectively. The obtained results were within the cavity region. Therefore, the Q factor and the sensitivity were significantly improved for the proposed structure, which makes this proposed design a potential and promising label-free biosensing device for the biomedical prognosis.

When metallic nanostructures are illuminated under resonance condition, part of the intercepted light is dissipated through nonradiative damping, resulting in a dramatic rise in temperature in the nanometer-scale vicinity of the particle surface. This nanoscale heat has been of great interest for applications in biomedicine and solar energy. We investigate the generation of heat in gold nanostructures at a constant metal volume and different morphologies under excited surface plasmonic resonance conditions using the finite-difference time-domain method and solving the thermal equation as well. Heat power as a measure of thermal efficiency has been obtained for different morphologies. Two kinds of structures including colloidal-like nanoparticles and lithographic planar nanostructures are discussed. It has been observed that as the surface-to-volume ratio in the structure increases, the heat power also increases along with a redshift, and the maximum increase is obtained for the porous structure. The amount of light transmission through porous nanostructure has also been investigated, compared with the nonporous structure, and it has been observed that they present better optical transmission. And therefore, they would have more desirable performance in multilayered structures. Moreover, the influence of surrounding medium on thermal and transmission characteristics of the nanostructures has been studied. Finally, the temperature distribution has been obtained for porous nanostructure for different absorbed powers by solving the heat transfer equation.

To obtain efficient and stable light trapping, angle rotation is introduced to form rotated square pillar array grating (SPAG) solar cells. Compared with the unpatterned stack slab and the optimized uniform SPAG cells, the maximum short-circuit current (J_sc) of the optimized rotated SPAG is increased by 78.54% and 3.21%, respectively. Moreover, besides the fact that the low-incidence angular sensitivity of J_sc could be maintained, J_sc of the optimized rotated SPAG will always be larger than that of the optimized uniform SPAG at any incident angle. Furthermore, when the structural parameters of the subsquare pillar slightly deviate from the optimum, the absorption only deceases slightly as well, which indicates both a high structural tolerance and a stable absorption performance. In addition, our results show not only that the proposed rotated SPAG is promising to make light trapping efficient and stable but also that introducing rotation disorders is promising for other high-absorption pseudounordered surface structures.

Stimulated emission depletion (STED), as one of the emerging super-resolution techniques, defines a state-of-the-art image resolution method. It has been developed into a universal fluorescent imaging tool over the past several years. The currently best available lateral resolution offered by STED is around 20 nm, but in real live cell imaging applications, the regular resolution offered through this mechanism is around 100 nm, limited by phototoxicity. Many critical biological structures are below this resolution level. Hence, it will be invaluable to improve the STED resolution through postprocessing techniques. We propose a deep adversarial network for improving the STED resolution significantly, which takes an STED image as an input, relies on physical modeling to obtain training data, and outputs a “self-refined” counterpart image at a higher resolution level. In other words, we use the prior knowledge on the STED point spread function and the structural information about the cells to generate simulated labeled data pairs for network training. Our results suggest that 30-nm resolution can be achieved from a 60-nm resolution STED image, and in our simulation and experiments, the structural similarity index values between the label and output result reached around 0.98, significantly higher than those obtained using the Lucy–Richardson deconvolution method and a state-of-the-art UNet-based super-resolution network.