Alistair Muir
ORC student
Date: Wednesday 7 May
Time: 2pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre C, B46
Ultra-Violet laser light is seen to produce a plethora of effects when incident upon the surface of single crystal lithium niobate. However, in this talk I shall be discussing just two. The first topic I shall be discussing is the conversion of the surface into a super-hydrophilic state, meaning, essentially, that the surface likes to be wet by water. Applications of relevance to optics and optoelectronics shall be described along with results of investigation into the cause of the effect and the limits of the extent to which spatial structuring can be achieved.
The second topic shall be the influence of continuous wave ultra-violet laser light on the ferroelectric polarity. Focussed UV laser light is seen to be capable of both directly inverting the ferroelectric polarity and, paradoxically, impeding the reversal of the polarity during a subsequent electric field poling step. Investigation into the nature of these two effects shall be presented as shall a qualitative model of the charge movement during UV exposure which shows the two effects to be products of a single dipolar charge distribution.