Demand for high-speed optical modulators and narrow-bandwidth infrared thermal emitters for numerous applications continues to rise and new optical devices are needed to deal with massive data flows, processing powers, and fabrication costs. Conventional techniques are usually hindered by material limitations or electronic interconnects and advances in organic nanocomposite materials and their integration into photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have been acknowledged as a promising alternative to single crystal techniques. The work presented in this thesis uses plasmonic and magneto-optic effects towards the development of novel optical devices for harnessing light and generating high bandwidth signals (> 40GHz) at room and cryogenic temperatures (4.2°K). Several publications have resulted from these efforts and are listed at the end of the abstract. In our first published research we developed a narrow-bandwidth mid-infrared thermal emitter using an Ag/dielectric/Ag thin film structure arranged in hexagonal planar lattice structures. PECVD produced nanoamorphous carbon (NAC) is used as a dielectric layer. Spectrally tunable (>2 μm) and narrow bandwidth (<0.5 μm) emission peaks in the range of 4-7μm were demonstrated by decreasing the resistivity of NAC from 10¹² and 10⁹ Ω.cm with an MoSi₂ dopant and increasing the emitter lattice constant from 4 to 7 μm. This technique offers excellent flexibility for developing cost-effective mid-IR sources as compared to costly fiber and quantum cascade lasers (QCLs). Next, the effect of temperature on the Verdet constant for cobalt-ferrite polymer nanocomposites was measured for a series of temperatures ranging from 40 to 200°K with a Faraday rotation polarimeter. No visual change was observed in the films during thermal cycling, and ~4x improvement was achieved at 40°K. The results are promising and further analysis is merited at 4.2°K to assess the performance of this material for cryogenic magneto-optic modulators for supercomputers. Finally, the dielectric constant and loss tangent of MAPTMS sol-gel films were measured over a wide range of microwave frequencies. The test structures were prepared by spin-coating sol-gel films onto metallized glass substrates. The dielectric properties of the sol-gel were probed with several different sets of coplanar waveguides (CPWs) electroplated onto sol-gel films. The dielectric constant and loss-tangent of these films were determined to be ~3.1 and 3 x 10⁻³ at 35GHz. These results are very promising indicating that sol-gels are viable cladding materials for high-speed electro-optic polymer modulators (>40GHz).

Software Configurable Optical Test System (SCOTS) developed at University of Arizona is a highly efficient optical metrology technique based on the principle of deflectometry, which can achieve comparable accuracy with interferometry but with low-cost hardware. In a SCOTS test, an LCD display is used to generate structured light pattern to illuminate the test optics and the reflected light is captured by a digital camera. The surface slope of test optics is determined by triangulation of the display pixels, test optics, and the camera. The surface shape is obtained by the integration of the slopes. Comparing to interferometry, which has long served as an accurate non-contact optical metrology technology, SCOTS overcomes the limitation of dynamic range and sensitivity to environment. It is able to achieve high dynamic range slope measurement without requiring null optics. In this dissertation, the sensitivity and performance of the test system have been analyzed comprehensively. Sophisticated calibrations of system components have been investigated and implemented in different metrology projects to push this technology to a higher accuracy including low-order terms. A compact on-axis SCOTS system lowered the testing geometry sensitivity in the metrology of 1-meter highly aspheric secondary mirror of Large Binocular Telescope. Sub-nm accuracy was achieved in testing a high precision elliptical X-ray mirror by using reference calibration. A well-calibrated SCOTS was successfully constructed and is, at the time of writing this dissertation, being used to provide surface metrology feedback for the fabrication of the primary mirror of Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope which is a 4-meter off-axis parabola with more than 8 mm aspherical departure.

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Ellipsometry techniques look at changes in polarization states to measure optical properties of thin film materials. A beam reflected from a substrate measures the real and imaginary parts of the index of the material represented as n and k, respectively. Measuring the substrate at several angles gives additional information that can be used to measure multilayer thin film stacks. However, the outstanding problem in standard ellipsometry is that it uses a limited number of incident polarization states (s and p). This limits the technique to isotropic materials. The technique discussed in this paper extends the standard process to measure anisotropic materials by using a larger set of incident polarization states. By using a polarimeter to generate several incident polarization states and measure the polarization properties of the sample, ellipsometry can be performed on biaxial materials.Use of an optimization algorithm in conjunction with biaxial ellipsometry can more accurately determine the dielectric tensor of individual layers in multilayer structures. Biaxial ellipsometry is a technique that measures the dielectric tensors of a biaxial substrate, single-layer thin film, or multi-layer structure. The dielectric tensor of a biaxial material consists of the real and imaginary parts of the three orthogonal principal indices (nₓ + ikₓ, n(y) +ik(y) and n(z) + ik(z)) as well as three Euler angles (α, β, and γ) to describe its orientation. The method utilized in this work measures an angle-of-incidence Mueller matrix from a Mueller matrix imaging polarimeter equipped with a pair of microscope objectives that have low polarization properties. To accurately determine the dielectric tensors for multilayer samples, the angle-of-incidence Mueller matrix images are collected for multiple wavelengths. This is done in either a transmission mode or a reflection mode, each incorporates an appropriate dispersion model. Given approximate a priori knowledge of the dielectric tensor and film thickness, a Jones reflectivity matrix is calculated by solving Maxwell's equations at each surface. Converting the Jones matrix into a Mueller matrix provides a starting point for optimization. An optimization algorithm then finds the best fit dielectric tensor based on the measured angle-of-incidence Mueller matrix image. This process can be applied to polarizing materials, birefringent crystals and the multilayer structures of liquid crystal displays. In particular, the need for such accuracy in liquid crystal displays is growing as their applications in industry evolve.

We have investigated ways of modifying a common water soluble CdTe NCs to become non-photobleaching. Such NCs are capable of responding reversibly to an inter-switching of the oxygen and argon environments over multiple hours of photoexcitation. They are found to quench upon exposure to oxygen, but when the system is purged with argon, their photoluminescence (PL) revives to the original intensity. Such discovery could potentially be used as oxygen nanosensors. These PL robust CdTe NCs immobilized on glass substrates also exhibit significant changes in their PL when certain organic/bio molecules are placed in their vicinity (nanoscale). This novel technique also known as NC-organic molecule close proximity imaging (NC-cp imaging) has found to provide contrast ratio greater by a factor of 2-3 compared to conventional fluorescence imaging technique. PL of NCs is recoverable upon removal of these organic molecules, therefore validating these NCs as potential all-optical organic molecular nanosensors and, upon optimization, ultimately serving as point detectors for purposes of super-resolution microscopy (with proper instrumentation). No solvents are required for this sensing mechanism since all solutions were dried under argon flow. Furthermore, core graded shell CdSe/CdSeₓS(1-x)/CdS giant nanocrystal (g-NCs) were found to have very robust PL temperature response. At a size of 10.2 nm in diameter, these g-NCs undergo PL drop of only 30% at 355K (normalized to PL intensity at 85K). In comparison, the core step shells CdSe/CdS g-NCs at the same diameter exhibit 80% PL drop at 355K. Spectral shifting and broadening were acquired and found to be 5-10 times and 2-4 times smaller respectively than the standard CdSe core and CdSe/CdS core shell NCs. It is also discovered that these core graded shell g-NCs are largely nonblinking and have insignificant photoluminescence decay even after exciting the samples at very high irradiance (44 kW/cm²) for over an hour. These types of g-NCs have great potential to be used as the active medium for temperature insensitive laser devices in the visible range or temperature insensitive bioprobes for bioimaging applications.

Deflectometry is a powerful metrology technique that uses off-the-shelf equipment to achieve nm-level accuracy measurement. This process is typically made by scanning lines of pixels or encoding the surface slopes information with phase using sinusoidal waves. Various measurement techniques exist, centroiding and phase-shifting being the most accepted, but their sensitivities vary with experimental conditions. We demonstrate solutions based on various parameters such as uncertainty or efficiency. The results are presented in a decision matrix and merit function. The parameters can be varied to represent various conditions. In particular, we are interested in using deflectometry in a context of fast, affordable and robust. Since none of the existing methods perform well under those parameters, we introduce a new method using binary patterns. Binary Pattern Deflectometry allows almost instant, simple and accurate slope retrieval, which is required for applications using mobile devices. We detail the theory of this new deflectometry method and the challenges of its implementation. Furthermore, the binary pattern method can also be combined with a classic phase-shifting method to eliminate the need of a complex unwrapping algorithm and retrieve the absolute phase, especially in cases like segmented optics where spatial algorithms have difficulties. Finally, whether it is used as a standalone or combined with phase-shifting, the binary patterns can, within seconds, calculate the slopes of any specular reflective surface. However there is no portable device to quickly measure eyeglasses, lenses, or mirrors. To complete the study, we present an entirely portable new deflectometry technique that runs on any Android™ smartphone with a front-facing camera. Our technique overcomes some specific issues of portable devices, like screen non-linearity or automatic gain control (AGC). We demonstrate our application by measuring an amateur telescope mirror and simulating the faulty Hubble Space Telescope primary mirror. In both cases, the application found the same amount of aberrations that were measured with an interferometer. Our technique can, in less than a minute, measure the sag errors of curved surfaces smaller than 50 nm RMS, simply using a smartphone.

The development of a quantitative phase microscope (QPM) has allowed the ability to acquire real-time phase movies of biological processes. The image processing of the data is critical to the system's ability to measure relative changes. The phase data must be consistent throughout a measurement and background fluctuations must be minimized. The research presented in this work discusses methods to effectively process sequences of phase data such that it can be used to quantify changes within real-time studies of living cells. This work begins by exploring two-dimensional phase unwrapping to determine the most effective ways to estimate the measured phase surface. Conventional methods of comparing unwrapping performance will be used. In addition, a novel method will be introduced that can characterize accuracy using continuity of derivatives. It will be shown that the most accurate phase estimates are made using modulation data with quality-guided phase unwrapping. After two-dimensionally unwrapping all frames of data within a measurement, there are background fluctuations due to residual surface shape as well as mean phase value fluctuations. Traditionally, manual background removal methods are implemented. Due to the large streams of data that need to be analyzed for the QPM, an automated background removal method is introduced that automatically discriminates the background from features of interest and characterizes and removes the background shape from all frames within a sequence of data. No user intervention is required and the performance rivals manual methods. The final step in processing data from a QPM is to ensure consistent phase unwrapping over an entire dataset. This is a previously undiscussed topic within the field of quantitative phase microscopy. The two-dimensional phase unwrapping methods result in reasonable phase estimates of the measured sample however there are often inconsistencies in local regions amongst sequential frames of data. This work introduces a new method, Smart Temporal unwrapping that minimizes temporal inconsistencies. The image processing methods presented in this work combine to allow phase data acquired using a QPM to quantify relative changes in biological samples. These processing steps effectively minimize errors due to system vibration, residual measurement aberration, and phase unwrapping inconsistencies.