Surface modification of dental implants is a key process in the production of these medical devices, and especially titanium implants used in the dental practice are commonly subjected to surface modification processes before their clinical use. A wide range of treatments, such as sand blasting, acid etching, plasma etching, plasma spray deposition, sputtering deposition and cathodic arc deposition, have been studied over the years in order to improve the performance of dental implants. Improving or accelerating the osseointegration process is usually the main goal of these surface processes, but the improvement of biocompatibility and the prevention of bacterial adhesion are also of considerable importance. In this review, we report on the research of the recent years in the field of surface treatments and coatings deposition for the improvement of dental implants performance, with a main focus on the osseointegration acceleration, the reduction of bacterial adhesion and the improvement of biocompatibility.

The lateral confinement of Bloch surface waves on a patterned multilayer is investigated by means of leakage radiation microscopy (LRM). Arrays of nanometric polymeric waveguides are fabricated on a proper silicon-nitride/silicon-oxide multilayer grown on a standard glass coverslip. By exploiting the functional properties of the polymer, fluorescent proteins are grafted onto the waveguides. A fluorescence LRM analysis of both the direct and the Fourier image plane reveals that a substantial amount of emitted radiation couples into a guided mode and then propagates into the nanometric waveguide. The observations of the mode are supported by numerical simulations.

We describe an interferometric technique suitable for determination of piezo-optic coefficients (POCs) in crystals. The method considers real nonparallelism of measured samples, thereby improving the measuring precision of POCs significantly. Corresponding equations are derived for the interferometric half-wave stress method. Using this technique we have determined a complete set of POCs of pure and $\mathrm{Mg}\mathrm{O}$-doped $\mathrm{Li}\mathrm{Nb}{\mathrm{O}}_3$ crystals. The reliability of the data has been confirmed by comparing the effective POCs expressed through the combinations of measured POCs and the effective POCs determined independently using highly precise optical birefringence measurements. Pure and $\mathrm{Mg}\mathrm{O}$-doped $\mathrm{Li}\mathrm{Nb}{\mathrm{O}}_3$ crystals reveal nearly the same magnitudes of POCs. However, $\mathrm{Li}\mathrm{Nb}{\mathrm{O}}_3$:MgO exhibits about 4 times higher resistance with respect to powerful light radiation, making it more suitable for application in acousto-optic devices that deal with superpowerful laser radiation.