Electronic and spintronic devices rely on the fact that free charge carriers in solids carry electric charge and spin. There are, however, other properties of charge carriers that might be exploited in new families of devices. In particular, if there are two or more minima in the conduction band (or maxima in the valence band) in momentum space, and if it is possible to confine charge carriers in one of these valleys, then it should be possible to make a valleytronic device.

The in-plane optical phonons around 200 meV in few-layer graphene are investigated utilizing infrared absorption spectroscopy. The phonon spectra exhibit unusual asymmetric features characteristic of Fano resonances, which depend critically on the layer thickness and stacking order of the sample. The phonon intensities in samples with rhombohedral (ABC) stacking are significantly higher than those with Bernal (AB) stacking.

Recently a melt-processed blend of 1,4-bis(α-cyano-4- octadecyloxystyryl)-2,5-dimethoxybenzene (C18-RG) dye and polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) has been demonstrated as a promising 3-dimentional optical data storage (ODS) medium 1. ODS in this novel system relies on the laser-induced switching of the aggregation state of the excimerforming fluorescent dye in the inert host polymer. Here we investigate the mechanism and the time scales involved in the writing process.

Graphene presents many distinctive optical properties that complement its attractive electronic and mechanical characteristics. We review some of the recent progress in understanding the electronic transitions and ultrafast dynamics in single and few-layer graphene crystals. © 2011 AOS.

Significant excitonic effects were observed in graphene by measuring its optical conductivity in a broad spectral range including the two-dimensional π-band saddle-point singularities in the electronic structure. The strong electron-hole interactions manifest themselves in an asymmetric resonance peaked at 4.62 eV, which is redshifted by nearly 600 meV from the value predicted by ab initio GW calculations for the band-to-band transitions.