In their article on pp. 779ff., A. Fleurence and Y. Yamada-Takamura evidence by means of scanning tunneling microscopy that the formation of homogeneous ZrB₂(0001) thin films is hindered by the nucleation of misoriented ZrB₂ crystallites. The cover picture shows one of these parasitic structures. Its existence is unambiguously related to the formation of (100) facets, the stability of which is speculated to be originating in the (2 × 6) surface reconstruction we report here for the first time. Based on these experimental observations, they propose solutions to prevent the formation of these parasitic crystallites which will lead to better integration of III-nitrides with silicon.

In their article on pp. 839ff., Yalin Lu and Kitt Reinhardt investigate the use of two nanostructure designs in solar cells, with the goal to enhance both light absorption and current density. The pictures show absorption in the solar spectrum using an embedded nanograting (top) and a through-grating nanostructures (bottom), over the Si layer thickness and the Si grating width, respectively. Both cases are under TM incidence.

Prof. Yalin Lu's working fields include photonics, nanomaterials, energy materials, etc.

The research activities of the Micro–nano Biophotonics Group at the Centro Láser UPM are focused on the design, fabrication and characterization of sub micro patterned biophotonic sensing cells (BICELLs), characterized using vertical coupling techniques. In their work on pp. 1087, R. Casquel and coworkers develop a simplified theoretical method which allows the optimization of a SU-8 pillar based BICELL, previously fabricated and demonstrated as biosensor by using antiBSA/BSA immunoreaction. 3D FDTD calculations, experimental results and proposed model calculations are compared. The suitability of the method allows to obtain values for expected biodetection limits for a variety of geometrical configurations.