Lithium Niobate: Bulk Crystals, Composites, Thin Films and Nanocrystals

Dear Colleagues,

The era of nanoscience has broadened our scientific cognition of lithium niobate (LN) crystals, revealing fascinating routes for their preparation as thin films, ultrathin membranes, nanoparticles,
nano-patterned surfaces, hybrid systems in combination with silica, polymers or liquid crystals, and many more. Moreover, technologies for precise structuring of the surface or the bulk on the sub-micron length scale using photons, electrons and ions have been successfully applied to LN. This progress is accompanied with an extension of our knowledge on LN from a nano-scientific viewpoint, i.e., on a microscopic level. It also opened the range of applications of LN in the direction of biophysics and medicine (cell-imaging and cancer therapy), photovoltaics of nano-ferroelectrics, integrated quantum photonics, nanophotonics, etc. This progress developed on the top of the already existing impact of bulk LN crystals, e.g., in the fields of nonlinear photonics (THz generation, frequency conversion), integrated optics (waveguiding, division wavelength multiplexing) or GHz-wave technologies (surface-acoustic wave detection, electro-optical modulators), etc.

This Special Issue intends to bring together the LN community around the latest experimental, theoretical and computational research highlights and may represent a state-of-the-art meeting point for researchers from diverse disciplines (physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, biophysics, material scientists, etc.) with the goal to disseminate the state-of-the-art knowledge on LN to a worldwide community and to foster the research progress on LN in nanosciences. We therefore would like to open this Special Issue to all related fields:

• Nanosciences and -technologies

• (Nonlinear) nanophotonics

• Integrated optics

• Quantum photonics

• (Nano-)Biophotonics

• Photovoltaics of nanoferroelectrics

• Accelerator physics

Covering LN as:

• Ultrathin LN-films

• LN membranes

• LN hybrid materials (LN/liquid crystals, LN/polymers, etc.)

• LN on insulators

• LN surfaces

• 2D and 3D structured LN

• LN nanocrystals and nanopowders

In addition to novel research results on bulk LN and its well-established applications.

Prof. Dr. Mirco Imlau
Prof. Dr. László Kovács
Guest Editors

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