Diffraction gratings are an important component in several applications including optical telecommunications and spectroscopy. Their usefulness increases if the gratings are externally tunable. To date, the basis for tunable gratings has been hard materials through multiple steps of micromachining technology. Another effort speaks of using the sinusoidal...

The state of the art of two-color focal plane arrays (FPAs) are two or three terminal photo detector pixels integrated with electronic readout circuits (ROICs). However, a multicolor (> 2) photodetector pixel requires many more terminals, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to integrate multicolor pixel arrays to ROICs due to the increase...

Currently, Si wafers and related wafer processing accounts for seventy-five percent of the cost of producing conventional solar panels. With a potential concentration ratio of 500 – 1000 and double the efficiency over conventional single junction cells, the use of concentrator multi-junction solar cell technologies will dramatically reduce the fraction...