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These articles were highlighted on the covers of the Advanced Optical Materials August issue:
Titanium dioxide, with its high refractive index, large bandgap, low thermal expansion, high Kerr nonlinearity, negative thermo-optic coefficient, and intrinsic biocompatibility is an exceptional candidate for applications such as photo voltaics and photocatalysis. S. K. Ozdemir, L. Yang, and co-workers mass-fabricate whispering-gallery-mode microdisk and microgoblet resonators on silicon chips from amorphous titanium dioxide films, with quality factors as high as 105.
Plasmonics
An atomic force microscopy (AFM) tip is used to provide local absorption maps and spectra of plasmonic resonators in the mid-IR. A. Centrone and co-workers use photothermally induced resonance (PTIR) to combine the lateral resolution of AFM, enabling the measurement of light absorption at a length scale several times smaller than the light diffraction limit. Since the PTIR signal is not affected by scattering, PTIR spectra are free of Fano spectral distortions typically observed in the far-field.
An organic microcavity is excited by blue and green pump lasers, showing bright coherent emission in the red. A. Mischok et al. show how an additional plasmonic microstructure in the cavity leads to the formation of Tamm-Plasmon-Polariton states and an intricate far-field pattern, which enables the observation of photonic Bloch states. Photography for this cover image by Juliane Schmidt.