Opal-like Structures and Inverse Opal-like Structures

Photonic crystals (PCs) with three-dimensional (3D) periodicity of dielectric structures, called artificial opals, or Opal-like Structures, have attracted much attention in the past decade for their ability in light manipulation, which has potential applications in the area of photonics [1]. The inverse opal-like structures (inverse OLS) can be used as eliminators of unwanted heat from the thermal emission sources [2], in the conventional lighting field for increasing efficiency and obtaining improved thermophotovoltaic devices [3], as piezoelectric transducers, solar cells, phosphors, short-wavelength light emitters [4], gas sensors [5] and so on.

Extreme states of nuclear matter

Studying extremely hot and dense nuclear matter is a very important problem of high energy physics.Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) predicts the existence of a new state of matter - the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which may be formed in relativistic nuclear collisions [1]. The study of the properties of the QGP is associated a number of fundamental problems, such as phase transitions in nuclear matter, the state of the QCD vacuum, the evolution of the universe and the mechanisms of neutron starsformation.