Our daily electromagnetic environment is becoming increasingly complex with the rapid development of consumer electronics and wireless communication technologies, which in turn necessitates the development of electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding, especially for transparent components. We engineered a transparent EMI shielding film with crack-template based metallic mesh (CT-MM) that shows highly homogeneous light transmission and strong microwave shielding efficacy. The CT-MM film is fabricated using a cost-effective lift-off method based on a crackle template. It achieves a shielding effectiveness of ~26 dB, optical transmittance of ~91% and negligible impact on optical imaging performance. Moreover, high–quality CT-MM film is demonstrated on a large–calibre spherical surface. These excellent properties of CT-MM film, together with its advantages of facile large-area fabrication and scalability in processing on multi-shaped substrates, make CT-MM a powerful technology for transparent EMI shielding in practical applications.

Plasmonic nanolasers have ushered in a paradigm of deep sub-wavelength coherent optical sources with ultrafast dynamics that exploit the strong confinement capabilities of metals. Although these devices are usually associated with higher thresholds due to absorption in metals, the high gain inorganic II–VI and III–V semiconductor materials have allowed the realization of plasmonic nanolasers operating under ambient conditions. In this work, we introduce single-crystalline lead halide perovskite (CH₃NH₃PbI₃) nanowires as an organic–inorganic semiconducting gain material to the plasmonic laser community. We demonstrate plasmonic laser action using a hybrid geometry whereby the perovskite nanowires are placed on a silver substrate with an insulating spacer layer. We report relatively low threshold operation under ambient conditions (13.5 μJ cm⁻²), and the devices work well even at temperatures up to 43.6 °C. The demonstration highlights the high optical gain achievable in perovskite materials and thus provides a solution to high gain materials for plasmonic devices.

A corrugated silver diaphragm-based optical fiber microphone (OFM), formed by extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric structure, was proposed. The sensor's sensitivity was improved by releasing diaphragm's initial stress with the help of corrugations. A simple ``gray-scale exposure'' method was proposed to fabricate the corrugation. Experimental results indicated that the mechanical sensitivity of the fabricated corrugated diaphragm (CD) was 52 nm/Pa, which was twice that of the planar diaphragm under the same parameters. Other characteristics of the fabricated microphone were also tested in detail. The proposed CD-based OFM showed the advantages of high sensitivity, simplicity and low cost, which was expected to be applied in the field of weak acoustic sensing.

The detection of rare circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in patients' blood is crucial for the early diagnosis of cancer, highly precise cancer therapy and monitoring therapeutic outcomes in real time. In this study we have developed an efficient strategy to capture and detect CTCs from the blood of cancer patients using a benzoboric acid modified gold-plated polymeric substrate with a regular 3D surface array. Compared with the smooth substrate, the substrate with the surface 3D microarrays exhibited a higher capture efficiency, i.e. 3.8 times that afforded by the smooth substrate. Additionally, due to the reversible reaction between the benzoboric acid on the 3D microarray and the sialic acid on CTCs, our strategy allowed for easy detachment of the captured CTCs from the substrate without causing critical damage to the cells. This will be of benefit for gaining further access to these rare cells for downstream characterization. The proposed strategy provides several advantages, including enhanced capture efficiency, high sensitivity, low cost and recovery of isolated CTCs, and could become a promising platform for early stage diagnosis of cancer.