Revealing the crucial roles of suppressive immune microenvironment in cardiac myxoma progression.

Cardiac myxoma is a commonly encountered tumor within the heart that has the potential to be life-threatening. However, the cellular composition of this condition is still not well understood. To fill this gap, we analyzed 75,641 cells from cardiac myxoma tissues based on single-cell sequencing. We defined a population of myxoma cells, which exhibited a resemblance to fibroblasts, yet they were distinguished by an increased expression of phosphodiesterases and genes associated with cell proliferation, differentiation, and adhesion. The clinical relevance of the cell populations indicated a higher proportion of myxoma cells and M2-like macrophage infiltration, along with their enhanced spatial interaction, were found to significantly contribute to the occurrence of embolism. The immune cells surrounding the myxoma exhibit inhibitory characteristics, with impaired function of T cells characterized by the expression of GZMK and TOX, along with a substantial infiltration of tumor-promoting macrophages expressed growth factors such as PDGFC. Furthermore, in vitro co-culture experiments showed that macrophages promoted the growth of myxoma cells significantly. In summary, this study presents a comprehensive single-cell atlas of cardiac myxoma, highlighting the heterogeneity of myxoma cells and their collaborative impact on immune cells. These findings shed light on the complex pathobiology of cardiac myxoma and present potential targets for intervention.

Dynamically manipulating long-wave infrared polarized thermal radiation by a vanadium dioxide metasurface.

Dynamically manipulating the spectra and polarization properties of thermal radiation is the key to counter an infrared polarization imaging system (IPIS) under the different background environments. In this Letter, we propose a phase-change metasurface thermal emitter (PCMTE) composed of vanadium dioxide (VO2) dipole antenna arrays to dynamically manipulate polarized radiation spectra in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) region of 8-14 µm. During the thermally induced and reversible insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) in VO2, by simulating the LWIR images at different polarization angles for the PCMTE and background plates, the PCMTE can realize dynamically tunable LWIR camouflage; then, their degree of linear polarization (DoLP) can be calculated, which can demonstrate that the PCMTE can also achieve dynamically tunable LWIR polarization camouflage at the specific radiation angles and backgrounds. Our proposed PCMTE provides an effective scheme for adaptive IR polarization camouflage.

Photonic spin Hall effect driven broadband multi-focus dielectric metalens.

The multi-focus metalens can couple the light into multiple channels in optical interconnections, which is beneficial to the development of planar, miniaturized, and integrated components. We propose broadband photonic spin Hall effect (PSHE) driven multi-focus metalenses, in which each nanobrick plays a positive role for all focal points. Three PSHE driven metalenses with four, six, and eight focal points have been designed and investigated, respectively. Under the incidences of left-/right-handed circularly polarized (LCP/RCP) light, these metalenses can generate regularly distributed two, three, and four RCP/LCP focal points, respectively. The uniformity of the focusing intensity has been investigated in detail by designing an additional four six-focus metalenses with different focus distributions. The uniqueness of these metalenses makes this design philosophy very attractive for applications in spin photonics, compact polarization detection, multi-imaging systems, and information processing systems.

Compact all-dielectric metasurface for full polarization detection at the long-wavelength infrared region.

Metasurfaces have been extensively demonstrated in engineering and detection of polarization of light from the visible to terahertz regions. However, most of the previous metasurfaces for polarization detection are spatially divided into different parts, and each of the parts focuses on different polarization components, resulting in large metasurface size and hindering their integration development. In this paper, a compact all-dielectric metasurface is proposed and numerically demonstrated to achieve full polarization detection at the long-wavelength infrared region (LIR). First, we design the metasurface at a wavelength of 10 µm, which can converge incident beams to specific positions corresponding to different polarization states. In this design, the metasurface is based on an oblique alternant double-phase modulation method, which arranges meta-atoms with the ability to control as many as possible different polarizations in a limited region, ensuring the high efficiency of polarization detection while giving more freedom and flexibility to the metasurface. Second, the intensity distributions of the electric field of different polarization components are simulated at wavelengths of 9.4 µm and 10.5 µm, verifying the broadband performance of the proposed metasurface. The proposed method has potential applications in integrated multifunctional devices and multispectral polarization imaging.

A tunable infrared emitter based on phase-changing material GST for visible-infrared compatible camouflage with thermal management.

Visible-infrared compatible camouflage is important to increase the counter-detection ability of a target due to the fast development of detection systems. However, most of the previously reported visible-infrared compatible camouflage structures are not suitable when the temperature of targets and type of background environment change. In this paper, we propose a tunable infrared emitter composed of ZnS/Ge/Ag/Ge2Sb2Te5/Ag films and numerically demonstrate visible-infrared compatible camouflage and radiation heat dissipation. Firstly, the proposed infrared emitter can produce different structural colors as the thickness of the ZnS film changes, which can be applied to visible camouflage. Secondly, the crystallization fraction of the Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) layer could help to engineer the average emissivity of the proposed infrared emitter, achieving tunable mid-infrared (MIR) camouflage, radiation heat dissipation, and long-infrared (LIR) camouflage in wavelength ranges of 3-5 µm, 5-8 µm, and 8-14 µm, respectively. Finally, we numerically demonstrate the visible camouflage and infrared camouflage for different application scenarios by using the simulated visible and infrared images. This work has promising application potential in visible-infrared compatible camouflage technology.

Influencing Effects of Fabrication Errors on Performances of the Dielectric Metalens.

Despite continuous developments of manufacturing technology for micro-devices and nano-devices, fabrication errors still exist during the manufacturing process. To reduce manufacturing costs and save time, it is necessary to analyze the effects of fabrication errors on the performances of micro-/nano-devices, such as the dielectric metasurface-based metalens. Here, we mainly analyzed the influences of fabrication errors in dielectric metasurface-based metalens, including geometric size and shape of the unit element, on the focusing efficiency and the full width at half maximum (FWHM) values. Simulation results demonstrated that the performance of the metasurface was robust to fabrication errors within a certain range, which provides a theoretical guide for the concrete fabrication processes of dielectric metasurfaces.

Multi-Beam Steering for 6G Communications Based on Graphene Metasurfaces.

As communication technology is entering the 6G era, a great demand for high-performance devices operating in the terahertz (THz) band has emerged. As an important part of 6G technology, indoor communication requires multi-beam steering and tracking to serve multi-users. In this paper, we have designed a graphene metasurface that can realize multi-beam steering for directional radiations. The designed metasurface consists of graphene ribbons, dielectric spacer, and metal substrate. By designing the graphene ribbons and controlling the applied voltage on them, we have obtained single-, double-, and triple-beam steering. In addition, we have also numerically calculated the far-field distributions of the steered multi-beam with a diffraction distance of 2 m. Our design has potential applications in future indoor directional 6G communications.

High-Efficiency Spin-Related Vortex Metalenses.

In this paper, one spin-selected vortex metalens composed of silicon nanobricks is designed and numerically investigated at the mid-infrared band, which can produce vortex beams with different topological charges and achieve different spin lights simultaneously. Another type of spin-independent vortex metalens is also designed, which can focus the vortex beams with the same topological charge at the same position for different spin lights, respectively. Both of the two vortex metalenses can achieve high-efficiency focusing for different spin lights. In addition, the spin-to-orbital angular momentum conversion through the vortex metalens is also discussed in detail. Our work facilitates the establishment of high-efficiency spin-related integrated devices, which is significant for the development of vortex optics and spin optics.

Tunable Thermal Camouflage Based on GST Plasmonic Metamaterial.

Thermal radiation control has attracted increasing attention in a wide range of field, including infrared detection, radiative cooling, thermal management, and thermal camouflage. Previously reported thermal emitters for thermal camouflage presented disadvantages of lacking either tunability or thermal stability. In this paper, we propose a tunable thermal emitter consisting of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) plasmonic metamaterial based on phase-change material Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) to realize tunable control of thermal radiation in wavelength ranges from 3 µm to 14 µm. Meanwhile, the proposed thermal emitter possesses near unity emissivity at the wavelength of 6.3 µm to increase radiation heat dissipation, maintaining the thermal stability of the system. The underlying mechanism relies on fundamental magnetic resonance and the interaction between the high-order magnetic resonance and anti-reflection resonance. When the environmental background is blackbody, the tunable emitter maintains signal reduction rates greater than 80% in middle-IR and longer-IR regions from 450 K to 800 K and from room temperature to 800 K, respectively. The dependences of thermal camouflage on crystallization fraction of GST, incident angles and polarization angles have been investigated in detail. In addition, the thermal emitter can continuously realize thermal camouflage for various background temperatures and environmental background in atmospheric window in the range of 3-5 µm.

Dielectric Metasurface-Based High-Efficiency Mid-Infrared Optical Filter.

Dielectric nanoresonantors may generate both electric and magnetic Mie resonances with low optical loss, thereby offering highly efficient paths for obtaining integrated optical devices. In this paper, we propose and design an optical filter with a high working efficiency in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) range, based on an all-dielectric metasurface composed of silicon (Si) nanodisk arrays. We numerically demonstrate that, by increasing the diameter of the Si nanodisk, the range of the proposed reflective optical filter could effectively cover a wide range of operation wavelengths, from 3.8 µm to 4.7 µm, with the reflection efficiencies reaching to almost 100%. The electromagnetic eigen-mode decomposition of the silicon nanodisk shows that the proposed optical filter is based on the excitation of the electric dipole resonance. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed filter has other important advantages of polarization-independence and incident-angle independence, ranging from 0° to 20° at the resonance dip, which can be used in a broad range of applications, such as sensing, imaging, and energy harvesting.