通常一种光开关只适用于一个特定的较窄领域。文章提出了一种基于介质上电润湿驱动技术的微流控矩阵光开关，可较广泛地应用于光通信和光电子系统中，并且结构简单、操作方便、偏振无关，易集成大型矩阵开关。文章给出了矩阵光开关的结构和工作原理，并设计了矩阵驱动电路。光开关的工作电压为58 V。研究结果表明：此矩阵光开关从“开”到“关”和从“关”到“开”的响应时间分别为120和100 ms；其插入损耗为0.26 dB，远比一般矩阵光开关低；消光比大，为139.7 dB。此外，文章给出了两种应用方案：光电显示器和多光束阵列开关。该课题的工作可为大型可集成矩阵光开关提供新的思路，并可促进微流控光学在光电子系统中的应用。

Understanding light–matter interaction lies at the core of our ability to harness physical effects and to translate them into new capabilities realized in modern integrated photonics platforms. Here, we present the design and characterization of optofluidic components in an integrated photonics platform and computationally predict a series of physical effects that rely on thermocapillary-driven interaction between waveguide modes and topography changes of optically thin liquid dielectric film. Our results indicate that this coupling introduces substantial self-induced phase change and transmittance change in a single channel waveguide, transmittance through the Bragg grating waveguide, and nonlocal interaction between adjacent waveguides. We then employ the self-induced effects together with the inherent built-in finite relaxation time of the liquid film, to demonstrate that the light-driven deformation can serve as a reservoir computer capable of performing digital and analog tasks, where the gas–liquid interface operates both as a nonlinear actuator and as an optical memory element.

We discuss the implementation and performance of an adaptive optics (AO) system that uses two cascaded deformable phase plates (DPPs), which are transparent optofluidic phase modulators, mimicking the common woofer/tweeter-type astronomical AO systems. One of the DPPs has 25 electrodes forming a keystone pattern best suited for the correction of low-order and radially symmetric modes; the second device has 37 hexagonally packed electrodes better suited for high-order correction. We also present simulation results and experimental validation for a new open-loop control strategy enabling simultaneous control of both DPPs, which ensures optimum correction for both large-amplitude low-order, and complex combinations of low- and high-order aberrations. The resulting system can reproduce Zernike modes up to the sixth radial order with stroke and fidelity up to twice better than what is attainable with either of the DPPs individually. The performance of the new AO configuration is also verified in a custom-developed fluorescence microscope with sensorless aberration correction.

Optical metamaterials and metasurfaces, which emerged in the course of the last few decades, have revolutionized our understanding of light and light–matter interaction. While solid materials are naturally employed as key building elements for construction of optical metamaterials mainly due to their structural stability, practically no attention was given to study of liquid-made optical two-dimensional (2-D) metasurfaces and the underlying interaction regimes between surface optical modes and liquids. We theoretically demonstrate that surface plasmon polaritons and slab waveguide modes that propagate within a thin liquid dielectric film trigger optical self-induced interaction facilitated by surface tension effects, which leads to the formation of 2-D optical liquid-made lattices/metasurfaces with tunable symmetry and can be leveraged for tuning of lasing modes. Furthermore, we show that the symmetry breaking of the 2-D optical liquid lattice leads to phase transition and tuning of its topological properties, which allows the formation, destruction, and movement of Dirac-points in the k-space. Our results indicate that optical liquid lattices support extremely low lasing threshold relative to solid dielectric films and have the potential to serve as configurable analogous computation platform.