NRL is developing new materials that transmit across wide wavelength ranges and will present recent results. MILTRAN is a new optical ceramic that transmits visible through LWIR and is well suited as an internal lens element. NRL-series moldable glasses transmit SWIR through LWIR and may be bonded to each other in an adhesive-free thermal process. NRL-200-series glasses transmit visible through MWIR and expand the glass map for multispectral lens designs. These new materials enable greater flexibility for designers of lenses for advanced defense applications and potentially reduce the size, weight and cost of next-generation optics.

Adding a charge blocking layer at the anode of organic photodiodes suppresses the current when forward biased. This simple structure can substitute thin film transistors as a switch when scaled into an array. However, the mechanism of the structure is still unknown. Meanwhile we observe a slow turn on when reverse biased, this indicates small and large signal injection dominated by different recombination mechanisms. Here, we developed a numerical model simulating this three-layer structure and compared against experimental data to describe the carrier dynamics and elucidate the physics dominant in this switchable photodiode.

Non-degenerate two-photon absorption (ND-2PA) across the indirect gap of silicon is theoretically and experimentally investigated in the current work. We present measurements of the 2PA coefficient of bulk silicon using femtosecond pump and probe pulses in the IR and mid-IR range. Enhancement of ND-2PA was observed from the results of our measurements with increasing non-degeneracy. This can be utilized when designing sensitive silicon-based mid-IR detectors. Modeling of the 2PA was performed by considering three theoretical pathways across the band structure of silicon for the two photons and a phonon, and the most dominant processes are determined by comparison to our measurements.