Background Mid to long-wave infrared detectors capture and interpret infrared radiation emitted by objects, and convert it into additional data. These detectors have wide ranging applications including gas sensing, thermal imaging, environmental monitoring, and defense applications. Typically, these detectors use micro- or nano-scale microwave-frequency...

Background Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been envisioned to benefit various emerging applications in the future, with enhanced spectral, energy, and hardware efficiency. One potential scenario is the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) for inventory management in warehouses or retail stores, where low-cost passive RFID tags...

Background Effective human-robot interaction must be informed by human expectations and knowledge of the world, including how robots are expected to act/interact in various situations. However, knowledge about the robot may be inconsistent with the ground truth, which can result in the robot not meeting expectations, and the interaction integrity being...

Cardiovascular disease is responsible for an estimated 17.9 million deaths each year, making it the leading cause of death worldwide. Continuous heart health monitoring way is the best preventative for heart failure. However, standard monitoring devices, including ECG and PPG, require direct physical contact, which can be difficult for certain patient...

When searching for missing persons, especially during emergency situations, such as catastrophic weather and infrastructure or geologic events, aerial reconnaissance can be an invaluable tool, particularly if the area is large and/or unstable. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with thermal imaging capabilities can help detect heat signatures from victims,...

Background Ultrathin photonic nanostructures, such as plasmonic and dielectric metamaterials and metasurfaces, have broad applications in electromagnetic wave manipulation, high resolution imaging, and computation. However, conventional production of these metastructures relies on precise nano-machining techniques that are difficult to manufacture...

Vital signs, such as heart and respiratory rate, provide critical insight into a person’s health. Radar has been used to remotely analyze and detect human activity and vital signs for many years. Despite all the great features such as motion sensitivity, privacy preservation, penetrability, and more, radar has limited spatial degrees of freedom...

The ability to create nano- and meso-scopic structures with precise geometry is of immense interest and value in nanotechnology. Self-assembly with building blocks that encode the details of the structure is highly promising, but difficult to realize because of kinetic traps and unwanted byproducts. Although possible, it often requires painstaking trial-and-error...

Background Polarization techniques are widely used to inspect sample material scattering, optical birefringence, and other material properties. One of polarization microscopy’s major limitations is that it evaluates sample polarization properties qualitatively due to the lack of complete polarization information. Mueller matrix microscopy (MM)...

Nanotechnology needs organization and precise control, which is why DNA self-assembly into nanostructures has been a remarkable breakthrough. The challenges in creating nanostructures and also the opportunities lie in how to achieve self-sustained replication. This allows for the system to amplify itself in unlimited cycles, which is not enabled in...