In this thesis the transport of light through disordered, densely packed semiconductor nanowire mats is studied. It is found that the extremely high photonic strength of these samples leads to corrections to the traditional diffusion picture of light transport due to mesoscopic interference. Such effects are characterized by large intensity fluctuations and correlations, and it is found the transport is dominated by only a few independent transmission channels, close to the Anderson localisation regime. In addition to the strongly scattering nanowire samples, comparatively weakly scattering samples of ZnO are investigated, demonstrating mesoscopic effects in a less exotic, isotropic multiple scattering material. Control is obtained over the transmission by a combination of shaping the incident wavefront and harnessing the intrinsic nonlinearity of the semiconductor with ultrafast optical excitation. Through these techniques, a bright focus at an arbitrary point through the nanowires is created which can be modulated by up to 60% in a demonstration of a reconfigurable photonic switch.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:635494 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Strudley, Tom |
| Contributors | Muskens, Otto |
| Publisher | University of Southampton |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/374303/ |
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