The 100 most-cited articles in Optics Express, 2020

In this paper, we employ the emerging paradigm of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for the solution of representative inverse scattering problems in photonic metamaterials and nano-optics technologies. In particular, we successfully apply mesh-free PINNs to the difficult task of retrieving the effective permittivity parameters of a number of finite-size scattering systems that involve many interacting nanostructures as well as multi-component nanoparticles. Our methodology is fully validated by numerical simulations based on the finite element method (FEM). The development of physics-informed deep learning techniques for inverse scattering can enable the design of novel functional nanostructures and significantly broaden the design space of metamaterials by naturally accounting for radiation and finite-size effects beyond the limitations of traditional effective medium theories.

Modern cameras typically use an array of millions of detector pixels to capture images. By contrast, single-pixel cameras use a sequence of mask patterns to filter the scene along with the corresponding measurements of the transmitted intensity which is recorded using a single-pixel detector. This review considers the development of single-pixel cameras from the seminal work of Duarte et al. up to the present state of the art. We cover the variety of hardware configurations, design of mask patterns and the associated reconstruction algorithms, many of which relate to the field of compressed sensing and, more recently, machine learning. Overall, single-pixel cameras lend themselves to imaging at non-visible wavelengths and with precise timing or depth resolution. We discuss the suitability of single-pixel cameras for different application areas, including infrared imaging and 3D situation awareness for autonomous vehicles.

We use inverse design to discover metalens structures that exhibit broadband, achromatic focusing across low, moderate, and high numerical apertures. We show that standard unit-cell approaches cannot achieve high-efficiency high-NA focusing, even at a single frequency, due to the incompleteness of the unit-cell basis, and we provide computational upper bounds on their maximum efficiencies. At low NA, our devices exhibit the highest theoretical efficiencies to date. At high NA-of 0.9 with translation-invariant films and of 0.99 with "freeform" structures-our designs are the first to exhibit achromatic high-NA focusing.

We present the bifunctional design of a broadband absorber and a broadband polarization converter based on a switchable metasurface through the insulator-to-metal phase transition of vanadium dioxide. When vanadium dioxide is metal, the designed switchable metasurface behaves as a broadband absorber. This absorber is composed of a vanadium dioxide square, silica spacer, and vanadium dioxide film. Calculated results show that in the frequency range of 0.52-1.2 THz, the designed system can absorb more than 90% of the energy, and the bandwidth ratio is 79%. It is insensitive to polarization due to the symmetry, and can still work well even at large incident angles. When vanadium dioxide is an insulator, a terahertz polarizer is realized by a simple anisotropic metasurface. Numerical calculation shows that efficient conversion between two orthogonal linear polarizations can be achieved. Reflectance of a cross-polarized wave can reach 90% from 0.42 THz to 1.04 THz, and the corresponding bandwidth ratio is 85%. This cross-polarized converter has the advantages of wide angle, broad…

The goal of computer-generated holography (CGH) is to synthesize custom illumination patterns by modulating a coherent light beam. CGH algorithms typically rely on iterative optimization with a built-in trade-off between computation speed and hologram accuracy that limits performance in advanced applications such as optogenetic photostimulation. We introduce a non-iterative algorithm, DeepCGH, that relies on a convolutional neural network with unsupervised learning to compute accurate holograms with fixed computational complexity. Simulations show that our method generates holograms orders of magnitude faster and with up to 41% greater accuracy than alternate CGH techniques. Experiments in a holographic multiphoton microscope show that DeepCGH substantially enhances two-photon absorption and improves performance in photostimulation tasks without requiring additional laser power.

Traditional imaging systems exhibit a well-known trade-off between the resolution and the field of view of their captured images. Typical cameras and microscopes can either "zoom in" and image at high-resolution, or they can "zoom out" to see a larger area at lower resolution, but can rarely achieve both effects simultaneously. In this review, we present details about a relatively new procedure termed Fourier ptychography (FP), which addresses the above trade-off to produce gigapixel-scale images without requiring any moving parts. To accomplish this, FP captures multiple low-resolution, large field-of-view images and computationally combines them in the Fourier domain into a high-resolution, large field-of-view result. Here, we present details about the various implementations of FP and highlight its demonstrated advantages to date, such as aberration recovery, phase imaging, and 3D tomographic reconstruction, to name a few. After providing some basics about FP, we list important details for successful experimental implementation, discuss its relationship with other computational…

This Roadmap article on three-dimensional integral imaging provides an overview of some of the research activities in the field of integral imaging. The article discusses various aspects of the field including sensing of 3D scenes, processing of captured information, and 3D display and visualization of information. The paper consists of a series of 15 sections from the experts presenting various aspects of the field on sensing, processing, displays, augmented reality, microscopy, object recognition, and other applications. Each section represents the vision of its author to describe the progress, potential, vision, and challenging issues in this field.

An actively tunable broadband terahertz absorber is numerically demonstrated, which consists of four identical vanadium dioxide (VO 2 ) square loops and a metal ground plane separated by a dielectric spacer. Simulation results show that an excellent absorption bandwidth of 90% terahertz absorptance reaches as wide as 2.45 THz from 1.85 to 4.3 THz under normal incidence. By changing the conductivity of VO 2 , an approximately perfect amplitude modulation is realized with the absorptance dynamically tuned from 4% to 100%. This absorption performance is greatly improved compared with previously reported VO 2 -based absorbers. The physical mechanisms of a single absorption band and the perfect absorption are elucidated by the wave-interference theory and the impedance matching theory, respectively. Field distributions are further discussed to explore the physical origin of this absorber. In addition, it also has the advantages of polarization insensitivity and wide-angle absorption. The proposed absorber may have many promising applications in the terahertz range such as modulator,…

Thin-film lithium niobate (LN) photonic integrated circuits (PICs) could enable ultrahigh performance in electro-optic and nonlinear optical devices. To date, realizations have been limited to chip-scale proof-of-concepts. Here we demonstrate monolithic LN PICs fabricated on 4- and 6-inch wafers with deep ultraviolet lithography and show smooth and uniform etching, achieving 0.27 dB/cm optical propagation loss on wafer-scale. Our results show that LN PICs are fundamentally scalable and can be highly cost-effective.

This paper presents a novel and general distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) signal recognition framework aimed at real-time detection and classification of intrusion in the space-time domain. The framework is based on the combination of a convolution neural network (CNN) and a long short-term memory network (LSTM). The convolutional structure extracts the spatial features from multi-channel signals of the DAS system, while the LSTM network analyzes the temporal relationships over time. The framework can be deployed on high-speed railways for real-time intrusion threat detection, which is one of the most urgent and challenging problems that needs to be resolved as there is an increasing demand for high detection and low false alarm rates, and short response time. The alarm sensitivity and specificity of the framework are controlled by user-set parameters. A real field experiment is conducted in a strong background noise scenario and an intrusion threat detection rate of 85.6%, with only 8.0% false alarm rate is achieved. For threat classification, the average threat detection rate is…

Lying between optical and microwave ranges, the terahertz band in the electromagnetic spectrum is attracting increased attention. Optical fibers are essential for developing the full potential of complex terahertz systems. In this manuscript, we review the optimal materials, the guiding mechanisms, the fabrication methodologies, the characterization methods and the applications of such terahertz waveguides. We examine various optical fiber types including tube fibers, solid core fiber, hollow-core photonic bandgap, anti-resonant fibers, porous-core fibers, metamaterial-based fibers, and their guiding mechanisms. The optimal materials for terahertz applications are discussed. The past and present trends of fabrication methods, including drilling, stacking, extrusion and 3D printing, are elaborated. Fiber characterization methods including different optics for terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) setups are reviewed and application areas including short-distance data transmission, imaging, sensing, and spectroscopy are discussed.

We demonstrate a hybrid integrated and widely tunable diode laser with an intrinsic linewidth as narrow as 40 Hz, achieved with a single roundtrip through a low-loss feedback circuit that extends the cavity length to 0.5 meter on a chip. Employing solely dielectrics for single-roundtrip, single-mode resolved feedback filtering enables linewidth narrowing with increasing laser power, without limitations through nonlinear loss. We achieve single-frequency oscillation with up to 23 mW fiber coupled output power, 70-nm wide spectral coverage in the 1.55 μm wavelength range with 3 mW output and obtain more than 60 dB side mode suppression. Such properties and options for further linewidth narrowing render the approach of high interest for direct integration in photonic circuits serving microwave photonics, coherent communications, sensing and metrology with highest resolution.

An ultrasensitive refractive index (RI) sensor based on enhanced Vernier effect is proposed, which consists of two cascaded fiber core-offset pairs. One pair functions as a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), the other with larger core offset as a low-finesse Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI). In traditional Vernier-effect based sensors, an interferometer insensitive to environment change is used as sensing reference. Here in the proposed sensor, interference fringes of the MZI and the FPI shift to opposite directions as ambient RI varies, and to the same direction as surrounding temperature changes. Thus, the envelope of superimposed fringe manifests enhanced Vernier effect for RI sensing while reduced Vernier effect for temperature change. As a result, an ultra-high RI sensitivity of -87261.06 nm/RIU is obtained near the RI of 1.33 with good linearity, while the temperature sensitivity is as low as 204.7 pm/ °C. The proposed structure is robust and of low cost. Furthermore, the proposed scheme of enhanced Vernier effect provides a new perspective and idea in other sensing field.

Metasurfaces have shown promising potentials in shaping optical wavefronts while remaining compact compared to bulky geometric optics devices. The design of meta-atoms, the fundamental building blocks of metasurfaces, typically relies on trial and error to achieve target electromagnetic responses. This process includes the characterization of an enormous amount of meta-atom designs with varying physical and geometric parameters, which demands huge computational resources. In this paper, a deep learning-based metasurface/meta-atom modeling approach is introduced to significantly reduce the characterization time while maintaining accuracy. Based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) structure, the proposed deep learning network is able to model meta-atoms with nearly freeform 2D patterns and different lattice sizes, material refractive indices and thicknesses. Moreover, the presented approach features the capability of predicting a meta-atom's wide spectrum response in the timescale of milliseconds, attractive for applications necessitating fast on-demand design and optimization of…

In this paper, we present an active controllable terahertz absorber with dual broadband characteristics, comprised by two diagonal identical patterns of vanadium dioxide in the top layer of the classical three-layer structure of metamaterial perfect absorbers. Simulation results show that two bandwidths of 80% absorption are 0.88 THz and 0.77 THz from 0.56 to 1.44 THz and 2.88 to 3.65 THz, respectively. By using thermal control to change the conductivity of the vanadium dioxide, absorptance can be continuously adjusted from 20% to 90%. The impedance matching theory is introduced to analyze and elucidate the physical mechanism of the perfect absorption. Field analyses are further investigated to get more insight into the physical origin of the dual broadband absorption. In addition, incident polarization insensitivity and wide-angle absorption are also demonstrated. The proposed absorber promises diverse applications in terahertz regime, such as imaging, modulating, sensing and cloaking.

The electrical and optical improvements of AlGaInP micro-light-emitting diodes (µLEDs) using atomic-layer deposition (ALD) sidewall passivation were demonstrated. Due to the high surface recombination velocity and minority carrier diffusion length of the AlGaInP material system, devices without sidewall passivation suffered from high leakage and severe drop in external quantum efficiency (EQE). By employing ALD sidewall treatments, the 20×20 µm 2 µLEDs resulted in greater light output power, size-independent leakage current density, and lower ideality factor. The forward current-voltage characteristic was enhanced by using surface pretreatment. Furthermore, ALD sidewall treatments recovered the EQE of the 20×20 µm 2 devices more than 150%. This indicated that AlGaInP µLEDs with ALD sidewall treatments can be used as the red emitter for full-color µLED display applications.

We report on the coherent beam combining of 61 femtosecond fiber chirped-pulse amplifiers in a tiled-aperture configuration along with an interferometric phase measurement technique. Relying on coherent beam recombination in the far field, this technique appears suitable for the combination of a large number of fiber amplifiers. The 61 output beams are stacked in a hexagonal arrangement and collimated through a high fill factor hexagonal micro-lens array. The residual phase error between two fibers is as low as λ/90 RMS, while a combining efficiency of ∼50% is achieved.

Two novel visual cryptography (VC) schemes are proposed by combining VC with single-pixel imaging (SPI) for the first time. It is pointed out that the overlapping of visual key images in VC is similar to the superposition of pixel intensities by a single-pixel detector in SPI. In the first scheme, QR-code VC is designed by using opaque sheets instead of transparent sheets. The secret image can be recovered when identical illumination patterns are projected onto multiple visual key images and a single detector is used to record the total light intensities. In the second scheme, the secret image is shared by multiple illumination pattern sequences and it can be recovered when the visual key patterns are projected onto identical items. The application of VC can be extended to more diversified scenarios by our proposed schemes.

We numerically demonstrate a tunable dual-band terahertz metamaterial absorber (MA) with near-unity absorption using single-layer square graphene ring structure with T-shaped graphene strips. By periodically loading four T-shaped graphene strips to the square graphene ring periodic array without additionally increasing the size of MA device, the pre-existing resonant frequency will have a red shift and simultaneously a new resonance will be generated at higher frequency for achieving a dual-band MA. The two absorption peaks can be tuned to the resonant frequencies of interest by varying the parameters of the square graphene ring and T-shaped graphene strips. The operating frequency of the absorption spectrum can be also manipulated by adjusting the chemical potential of graphene, without changing their geometric parameters. Additionally, numerical results show that the proposed MA possesses polarization-independent and incident-angle-insensitive properties. To further extend the proposed structure's application with more absorption peaks, a tri-band MA is investigated through adding…

Superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) with near-unity system efficiency is a key enabling, but still elusive, technology for numerous quantum fundamental theory verifications and quantum information applications. The key challenge is to have both a near-unity photon-response probability and absorption efficiency simultaneously for the meandered nanowire with a finite filling ratio, which is more crucial for NbN than other superconducting materials (e.g., WSi) with lower transition temperatures. Here, we overcome the above challenge and produce NbN SNSPDs with a record system efficiency by replacing a single-layer nanowire with twin-layer nanowires on a dielectric mirror. The detector at 0.8 K shows a maximal system detection efficiency (SDE) of 98% at 1590 nm and a system efficiency of over 95% in the wavelength range of 1530-1630 nm. Moreover, the detector at 2.1 K demonstrates a maximal SDE of 95% at 1550 nm using a compacted two-stage cryocooler. This type of detector also shows the robustness against various parameters, such as the geometrical size of the…

In the conventional weighted Gerchberg-Saxton (GS) algorithm, the feedback is used to accelerate the convergence. However, it will lead to the iteration divergence. To solve this issue, an adaptive weighted GS algorithm is proposed in this paper. By replacing the conventional feedback with our designed feedback, the convergence can be ensured in the proposed method. Compared with the traditional GS iteration method, the proposed method improves the peak signal-noise ratio of the reconstructed image with 4.8 dB on average. Moreover, an approximate quadratic phase is proposed to suppress the artifacts in optical reconstruction. Therefore, a high-quality image can be reconstructed without the artifacts in our designed Argument Reality device. Both numerical simulations and optical experiments have validated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The mid-infrared (MIR) represents a large portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is progressively being exploited for an enormous number of applications. Thermal imaging cameras, dental and skin resurfacing lasers, and narcotics detectors at airports are all mainstream examples involving the MIR, but potential applications of MIR technologies are much larger. Accessing the unique opportunities afforded by the MIR is critically dependent on the specific characteristics of MIR emitting sources that become available. In this review, we survey an important enabling technology to the opening up of MIR science and applications, namely that driven by fiber-based sources of coherent MIR radiation. In this review paper, we describe many of the key advances in the innovation and development of such sources over the past few decades and discuss many of the underlying science and technology issues that have resulted in specific recent source achievements, especially in light of new applications enabled by these new source capabilities. We also discuss a few specific anticipated future…

A multilayer metamaterial with switchable functionalities is presented based on the phase-transition property of vanadium dioxide. When vanadium dioxide is in the metallic state, a broadband absorber is formed. Calculated results show that the combination of two absorption peaks enables absorptance more than 90% in the wide spectral range from 0.393 THz to 0.897 THz. Absorption performance is insensitive to polarization at the small incident angle and work well even at the larger incident angle. When vanadium dioxide is in the insulating state, the designed system behaves as a narrowband absorber at the frequency of 0.677 THz. This narrowband absorber shows the advantages of wide angle and polarization insensitivity due to the localized magnetic resonance. Furthermore, the influences of geometrical parameters on the performance of absorptance are discussed. The proposed switchable absorber can be used in various applications, such as selective heat emitter and solar photovoltaic field.

We consider refractive index sensing with optical bounds states in the continuum (BICs) in dielectric gratings. Applying a perturbative approach we derived the differential sensitivity and the figure of merit of a sensor operating in the spectral vicinity of a BIC. Optimisation design approach for engineering an effective sensor is proposed. An analytic formula for the maximal sensitivity with an optical BIC is derived. The results are supplied with straightforward numerical simulations.

High-accuracy and high-speed three-dimensional (3D) fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has been widely applied in many fields. Recently, researchers discovered that deep learning can significantly improve fringe analysis. However, deep learning requires numerous objects to be scanned for training data. In this paper, we propose to build the digital twin of an FPP system and perform virtual scanning using computer graphics, which can significantly save cost and labor. The proposed method extracts 3D geometry directly from a single-shot fringe image, and real-world experiments have demonstrated the success of the virtually trained model. Our virtual scanning method can automatically generate 7,200 fringe images and 800 corresponding 3D scenes within 1.5 hours.

We present an ultrafast thin-disk based multipass amplifier operating at a wavelength of 1030 nm, designed for atmospheric research in the framework of the Laser Lightning Rod project. The CPA system delivers a pulse energy of 720 mJ and a pulse duration of 920 fs at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. The 240 mJ seed pulses generated by a regenerative amplifier are amplified to the final energy in a multipass amplifier via four industrial thin-disk laser heads. The beam quality factor remains ∼ 2.1 at the output. First results on horizontal long-range filament generation are presented.

A terahertz bifunctional absorber is presented with broadband and narrowband absorbing properties in a graphene-spacer-vanadium dioxide-spacer-metal configuration. Carrier relaxation time of graphene τ = 1.0ps (τ = 0.1ps) is chosen for narrowband (broadband) absorption. When vanadium dioxide is in the conducting state, the design behaves as a narrowband absorber, and it is composed of a square-shaped graphene, topas spacer, and metallic vanadium dioxide film. There is an absorption band with 100% absorptance at the frequency of 1.37 THz. Narrowband absorption is caused by the localized magnetic resonance. When vanadium dioxide is in the insulating state, the design behaves as a broadband absorber composed of a square-shaped graphene, topas layer, vanadium dioxide film, and metal film. It has a broadband absorption in the frequency range of 1.05-2.35 THz, and the corresponding absorptance is more than 90%. The merging of two resonances with overlapping region ensures broadband performance of the designed absorber. The working bandwidth and intensity of narrowband absorption and…

Single-pixel imaging is an imaging technique that has recently attracted a lot of attention from several areas. This paper presents a study on the influence of the Hadamard basis ordering on the image reconstruction quality, using simulation and experimental methods. During this work, five different orderings, Natural, Walsh, Cake-cutting, High Frequency and Random orders, along with two different reconstruction algorithms, TVAL3 and NESTA, were tested. Also, three different noise levels and compression ratios from 0.1 to 1 were evaluated. A single-pixel camera was developed using a digital micromirror device for the experimental phase. For a compression ratio of 0.1, the Cake-cutting order achieved the best reconstruction quality, while the best contrast was achieved by Walsh order. For compression ratios of 0.5, the Walsh and Cake-cutting orders achieved similar results. Both Walsh and Cake-cutting orders reconstructed the images with good quality using compression ratios from 0.3. Finally, the TVAL3 algorithm showed better image reconstruction quality, in comparison with NESTA,…

Imaging through scattering media is challenging since the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the reflection can be heavily reduced by scatterers. Single-pixel detectors (SPD) with high sensitivities offer compelling advantages for sensing such weak signals. In this paper, we focus on the use of ghost imaging to resolve 2D spatial information using just an SPD. We prototype a polarimetric ghost imaging system that suppresses backscattering from volumetric media and leverages deep learning for fast reconstructions. In this work, we implement ghost imaging by projecting Hadamard patterns that are optimized for imaging through scattering media. We demonstrate good quality reconstructions in highly scattering conditions using a 1.6% sampling rate.

Single-photon light detection and ranging (LiDAR), offering single-photon sensitivity and picosecond time resolution, has been widely adopted for active imaging applications. Long-range active imaging is a great challenge, because the spatial resolution degrades significantly with the imaging range due to the diffraction limit of the optics, and only weak echo signal photons can return but mixed with a strong background noise. Here we propose and demonstrate a photon-efficient LiDAR approach that can achieve sub-Rayleigh resolution imaging over long ranges. This approach exploits fine sub-pixel scanning and a deconvolution algorithm tailored to this long-range application. Using this approach, we experimentally demonstrated active three-dimensional (3D) single-photon imaging by recognizing different postures of a mannequin model at a stand-off distance of 8.2 km in both daylight and night. The observed spatial (transversal) resolution is ∼5.5 cm at 8.2 km, which is about twice of the system's resolution. This also beats the optical system's Rayleigh criterion. The results are…

In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a switchable terahertz metamaterial absorber with broadband and multi-band absorption based on a simple configuration of graphene and vanadium dioxide (VO2). The switchable functional characteristics of the absorber can be achieved by changing the phase transition property of VO2. When VO2 is insulating, the device acts as a broadband absorber with absorbance greater than 90% under normal incidence from 1.06 THz to 2.58 THz. The broadband absorber exhibits excellent absorption performance under a wide range of incident and polarization angles for TE and TM polarizations. Moreover, the absorption bandwidth and intensity of the absorber can be dynamically adjusted by changing the Fermi energy level of graphene. When VO2 is in the conducting state, the designed metamaterial device acts as a multi-band absorber with absorption frequencies at 1 THz, 2.45 THz, and 2.82 THz. The multi-band absorption is achieved owing to the fundamental resonant modes of the graphene ring sheet, VO2 hollow ring patch, and coupling interaction between them.…

A novel fiber Michelson interferometer (FMI) based on parallel dual polarization maintaining fiber Sagnac interferometers (PMF-SIs) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for temperature sensing. The free spectral range (FSR) difference of dual PMF-SIs determines the FSR of envelope and sensitivity of the sensor. The temperature sensitivity of parallel dual PMF-SIs is greatly enhanced by the Vernier effect. Experimental results show that the temperature sensitivity of the proposed sensor is improved from -1.646 nm/°C (single PMF-SI) to 78.984 nm/°C (parallel dual PMF-SIs), with a magnification factor of 47.99, and the temperature resolution is improved from ±0.03037°C to ±0.00063°C by optimizing the FSR difference between the two PMF-SIs. Our proposed ultrasensitive temperature sensor is with easy fabrication, low cost and simple configuration which can be implemented for various real applications that need high precision temperature measurement.

In this paper, tunable dual plasmon-induced transparency (PIT) is achieved by using a monolayer graphene metamaterial in the terahertz region, which consists of two graphene strips of different sizes and a graphene ring. As the dual PIT effect is induced by the destructive interference between the two quasi-dark modes and the bright mode, we propose a four-level plasmonic system based on the linearly coupled Lorentzian oscillators to explain the mechanism behind the dual PIT. It is proved that the theoretical results agree well with the simulation results. Most importantly, the sensing properties of the designed device have been investigated in detail and we found that it can exhibit high sensitivities and figure of merit (FOM). Furthermore, the dual PIT windows can be effectively modulated by changing the Fermi energy of the graphene layer and the angle of incidence. Thus, the proposed graphene-based metamaterial can hold wide applications for switches, modulators, and multi-band refractive index sensors in the terahertz region.

Light detection and ranging (lidar) has long been used in various applications. Solid-state beam steering mechanisms are needed for robust lidar systems. Here we propose and demonstrate a lidar scheme called "Swept Source Lidar" that allows us to perform frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) ranging and nonmechanical beam steering simultaneously. Wavelength dispersive elements provide angular beam steering, while a laser frequency is continuously swept by a wideband swept source over its whole tuning bandwidth. Employing a tunable vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser and a 1-axis mechanical beam scanner, three-dimensional point cloud data has been obtained. Swept Source Lidar systems can be flexibly combined with various beam steering elements to realize full solid-state FMCW lidar systems.

Integrating tunable characteristics and multiple functions into a single metasurface has become a new scientific and technological undertaking that needs to deal with huge challenges, especially in the terahertz frequency region. The multifunctional design combining the broadband absorption and broadband polarization conversion using a single switchable metasurface is proposed in this paper. The switchable performance can be realized by treating the insulation to metal phase transition properties of vanadium dioxide (VO 2 ). At high temperature (74 °C), the proposed metasurface can be used as a broadband absorber which consists of a VO 2 square ring, polyimide (PI) spacer, and VO 2 film. Simulated results show that the terahertz wave absorption can reach above 90% with the bandwidth ratio of 75% in the frequency range of 0.74 THz-1.62 THz. This absorber is insensitive to polarization resulted from the symmetry structure and also shows a good performance at large incident angles. Once the temperature is lower than the cooling phase transition temperature (about 62 °C) and VO 2 is in…

We present a deep neural network for generating a multi-depth hologram and its training strategy. The proposed network takes multiple images of different depths as inputs and calculates the complex hologram as an output, which reconstructs each input image at the corresponding depth. We design a structure of the proposed network and develop the dataset compositing method to train the network effectively. The dataset consists of multiple input intensity profiles and their propagated holograms. Rather than simply training random speckle images and their propagated holograms, we generate the training dataset by adjusting the density of the random dots or combining basic shapes to the dataset such as a circle. The proposed dataset composition method improves the quality of reconstructed images by the holograms generated by the network, called deep learning holograms (DLHs). To verify the proposed method, we numerically and optically reconstruct the DLHs. The results confirmed that the DLHs can reconstruct clear images at multiple depths similar to conventional multi-depth…

We present a design of a tunable terahertz (THz) filter (TTF) used in an indoor communication system. The unit cell of TTF is composed of ring-shaped and cross-shaped nanostructures. By utilizing the micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) technique to modify the height between the ring-shaped and cross-shaped nanostructures in the incident transverse electric (TE) mode, the resonant frequencies can be tuned from 0.530 THz to 0.760 THz, which covers an atmospheric window from 0.625 THz to 0.725 THz for indoor wireless optical communication applications. This design of TTF provides an effective approach to select and filter specific signals. It makes the data processing more flexible at the transmission end of the communication system. Furthermore, such a TTF design can be realized the commercialization of communication system components due to its integrated circuit (IC) process compatibility, miniaturization and high flexibility.

External temperature variations inevitably affect the accuracy of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensors. To that end, we propose an ultra-compact label-free dual-channel SPR fiber sensor (DSPRFS) that can simultaneously measure the glucose concentration and ambient temperature in real-time. The proposed sensor is based on a unique dual-channel structure fabricated by etching a side-hole fiber (SHF), and has significantly higher spatial sensitivity than traditional SPR biosensors. After coating with silver and zinc oxide films, one channel was filled with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to sense the ambient temperature, and the other channel was immobilized with glucose oxidase (GOx) enzyme for glucose sensing. The proposed sensor is analyzed theoretically, fabricated and characterized. Glucose concentration sensitivity and temperature sensitivity of the manufactured sensor sample were found to be as high as 6.156 nm/mMand -1.604 nm/°C with limits of detection (LOD) of 16.24 µM and 0.06 °C, respectively. The proposed sensor has an extremely compact structure, enables temperature…

We present a flexible all-polarization-maintaining (PM) mode-locked ytterbium (Yb):fiber laser based on a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror (NALM). In addition to providing detailed design considerations, we discuss the different operation regimes accessible by this versatile laser architecture and experimentally analyze five representative mode-locking states. These five states were obtained in a 78-MHz configuration at different intracavity group delay dispersion (GDD) values ranging from anomalous (-0.035 ps 2 ) to normal (+0.015 ps 2 ). We put a particular focus on the characterization of the intensity noise as well as the free-running linewidth of the carrier-envelope-offset (CEO) frequency as a function of the different operation regimes. We observe that operation points far from the spontaneous emission peak of Yb (∼1030 nm) and close to zero intracavity dispersion can be found, where the influence of pump noise is strongly suppressed. For such an operation point, we show that a CEO linewidth of less than 10-kHz at 1 s integration can be obtained without any active…

This paper presents an integrated technical framework to protect pipelines against both malicious intrusions and piping degradation using a distributed fiber sensing technology and artificial intelligence. A distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) system based on phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry (φ-OTDR) was used to detect acoustic wave propagation and scattering along pipeline structures consisting of straight piping and sharp bend elbow. Signal to noise ratio of the DAS system was enhanced by femtosecond induced artificial Rayleigh scattering centers. Data harnessed by the DAS system were analyzed by neural network-based machine learning algorithms. The system identified with over 85% accuracy in various external impact events, and over 94% accuracy for defect identification through supervised learning and 71% accuracy through unsupervised learning.

We present a tomographic imaging technique, termed Deep Prior Diffraction Tomography (DP-DT), to reconstruct the 3D refractive index (RI) of thick biological samples at high resolution from a sequence of low-resolution images collected under angularly varying illumination. DP-DT processes the multi-angle data using a phase retrieval algorithm that is extended by a deep image prior (DIP), which reparameterizes the 3D sample reconstruction with an untrained, deep generative 3D convolutional neural network (CNN). We show that DP-DT effectively addresses the missing cone problem, which otherwise degrades the resolution and quality of standard 3D reconstruction algorithms. As DP-DT does not require pre-captured data or pre-training, it is not biased towards any particular dataset. Hence, it is a general technique that can be applied to a wide variety of 3D samples, including scenarios in which large datasets for supervised training would be infeasible or expensive. We applied DP-DT to obtain 3D RI maps of bead phantoms and complex biological specimens, both in simulation and experiment,…

We report on crater formation, line scribing and cavity milling experiments on Silicon, Copper, Aluminum and stainless steel with GHz bursts of femtosecond pulses. The intra-burst repetition rate has been varied between 0.88 and 3.52 GHz, the number of pulses per burst between 50 and 3200, the burst fluence between 8 and 80 J/cm2. For these experiments, a 100-W femtosecond GHz-burst laser has been developed on an industrial laser basis, delivering a total burst energy up to 1 mJ at 100 kHz, with an adjustable number of pulses per burst. The results highlight the conditions to obtain high-ablation efficiency, show how to optimize the machining quality and point out the burst duration as the relevant parameter for femtosecond GHz machining.

A novel terahertz nanofilm sensor consisting of toroidal dipole bound states in the continuum (TD-BIC) inspired Fano resonance metasurface is proposed and investigated, which exhibits both the TD character and BIC feature. When the mirror symmetry of the unit cell was broken, the TD resonance was excited and demonstrated by anti-aligned magnetic dipoles and calculated scattering powers and the BIC mode was verified with the quality factor satisfying the inverse square law. Combined with the amplitude difference referencing technique, the TD-BIC inspired Fano resonance was utilized for nanofilm sensing at THz frequencies for the first time. Simulation results show that the amplitude difference can be easily observed by comparing the resonance frequency shift under difference thicknesses of germanium overlayer. Moreover, by coating with a 40 nm-thick analyte overlayer, the sensitivity of amplitude difference can achieve 0.32/RIU, which is a significant value and more suitable for sensing nanofilm analytes than the traditional frequency shift method. These advantages make our proposed…

The optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) has been widely investigated to generate ultra-pure single-frequency microwave signals. In this study, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an active mode-locking optoelectronic oscillator (AML-OEO), which can generate broadband microwave frequency comb (MFC) signals. An additional intensity modulator is inserted into the OEO as an active mode-locking device for loss modulation to realize phase-locking between adjacent oscillation modes. Through the active mode-locking technique, steady multi-mode oscillation is achieved, which is difficult to realize in a conventional OEO due to the mode-competition effect. By tuning the frequency of the active modulation signal (AMS), both fundamental and harmonic AML-OEOs can be established. In the experiments, MFC signals with a frequency spacing of 195 kHz and 50.115/100.035 MHz are generated with fundamental and harmonic AML-OEOs.

We describe the optical transmission properties of a surface plasmon polariton waveguide structure consisting of a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide and a semicircular resonant cavity coupled with a key-shaped resonant cavity. Finite element algorithm simulated the optical response of a MIM waveguide structure. The influence of coupling length, geometrical size, and asymmetry of the key-shaped cavity and the radius of the semicircular resonant cavity on the Fano resonance line was investigated. Results demonstrate that variation of the key-shaped cavity asymmetry leads to the appearance of dual Fano resonances. When materials with different refractive index fill in the key-shaped cavity, the MIM waveguide structure achieves a sensitivity of 1261.67 nm/RIU. This performance allows the waveguide to be used for nanoscale biosensor applications such as measuring glucose concentrations. We simulated various spiked glucose concentrations by calculating the frequency shift as the second Fano resonance line moves towards longer wavelength. Glucose concentrations were calculated from…

We proposed a dual-controlled broadband terahertz (THz) absorber based on graphene and Dirac semimetal. Calculated results show that the absorptance over 90% is achieved in the frequency range of 4.79-8.99 THz for both transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) polarizations. Benefiting from the advantage of the dielectric constant of these materials varying with chemical doping or gate voltage, the simulation results exhibit that the absorbance bandwidth can be controlled independently or jointly by varying the Fermi energy of the graphene or Dirac semimetal patterns instead of redesigning the absorbers. Impedance matching theory was introduced to analyze the absorption spectra changing with EF. The bandwidth and absorptivity of the proposed absorber are almost independent of changing the incident angle θ up to 35° and 40° for TE and TM modes, respectively. It works well even at a larger incident angle. Because of the symmetry of the structure, this designed absorber is polarization insensitive and almost the same absorptivity for both polarizations. Furthermore, the…

Silicon photonics is a platform that enables densely integrated photonic components and systems and integration with electronic circuits. Depletion mode modulators designed on this platform suffer from a fundamental frequency response limit due to the mobility of carriers in silicon. Lithium niobate-based modulators have demonstrated high performance, but the material is difficult to process and cannot be easily integrated with other photonic components and electronics. In this manuscript, we simultaneously take advantage of the benefits of silicon photonics and the Pockels effect in lithium niobate by heterogeneously integrating silicon photonic-integrated circuits with thin-film lithium niobate samples. We demonstrate the most CMOS-compatible thin-film lithium niobate modulator to date, which has electro-optic 3 dB bandwidths of 30.6 GHz and half-wave voltages of 6.7 V×cm. These modulators are fabricated entirely in CMOS facilities, with the exception of the bonding of a thin-film lithium niobate sample post fabrication, and require no etching of lithium niobate.

We experimentally demonstrate an on-chip electro-optic circuit for realizing arbitrary nonlinear activation functions for optical neural networks (ONNs). The circuit operates by converting a small portion of the input optical signal into an electrical signal and modulating the intensity of the remaining optical signal. Electrical signal processing allows the activation function circuit to realize any optical-to-optical nonlinearity that does not require amplification. Such line shapes are not constrained to those of conventional optical nonlinearities. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the activation function improves the performance of an ONN on the MNIST image classification task. Moreover, the activation circuit allows for the realization of nonlinearities with far lower optical signal attenuation, paving the way for much deeper ONNs.

A high-speed Gaussian-modulated continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD) with a local local oscillator (LLO) is experimentally demonstrated based on pilot-tone-assisted phase compensation. In the proposed scheme, the frequency-multiplexing and polarization-multiplexing techniques are used for the separate transmission and heterodyne detection between quantum signal and pilot tone, guaranteeing no crosstalk from strong pilot tone to weak quantum signal and different detection requirements of low-noise for quantum signal and high-saturation limitation for pilot tone. Moreover, compared with the conventional CVQKD based on homodyne detection, the proposed LLO-CVQKD scheme can measure X and P quadrature simultaneously using heterodyne detection without need of extra random basis selection. Besides, the phase noise, which contains the fast-drift phase noise due to the relative phase of two independent lasers and the slow-drift phase noise introduced by quantum channel disturbance, has been compensated experimentally in real time, so that a low level of excess noise with a 25…

The performance of the dark spectrum fitting (DSF) atmospheric correction algorithm is evaluated using matchups between metre- and decametre-scale satellite imagery as processed with ACOLITE and measurements from autonomous PANTHYR hyperspectral radiometer systems deployed in the Adriatic and North Sea. Imagery from the operational land imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, the multispectral instrument (MSI) on Sentinel-2 A and B, and the PlanetScope CubeSat constellation was processed for both sites using a fixed atmospheric path reflectance in a small region of interest around the system's deployment location, using a number of processing settings, including a new sky reflectance correction. The mean absolute relative differences (MARD) between in situ and satellite measured reflectances reach <20% in the Blue and 11% in the Green bands around 490 and 560 nm for the best performing configuration for MSI and OLI. Higher relative errors are found for the shortest Blue bands around 440 nm (30-100% MARD), and in the Red-Edge and near-infrared bands (35-100% MARD), largely influenced by the lower…

High-fidelity periodic poling over long lengths is required for robust, quasi-phase-matched second-harmonic generation using the fundamental, quasi-TE polarized waveguide modes in a thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) waveguide. Here, a shallow-etched ridge waveguide is fabricated in x-cut magnesium oxide doped TFLN and is poled accurately over 5 mm. The high fidelity of the poling is demonstrated over long lengths using a non-destructive technique of confocal scanning second-harmonic microscopy. We report a second-harmonic conversion efficiency of up to 939 %.W−1 (length-normalized conversion efficiency 3757 %.W−1.cm−2), measured at telecommunications wavelengths. The device demonstrates a narrow spectral linewidth (1 nm) and can be tuned precisely with a tuning characteristic of 0.1 nm/°C, over at least 40 °C without measurable loss of efficiency.

A tunable bifunctional terahertz (THz) metamaterial device based on Dirac semimetal films (DSFs) and VO2 is presented. The insulator-to-metal phase transition of VO2 enables bifunctional asymmetric transmission and dual-directional absorption to be switched in the THz range. When VO2 serves as a dielectric, tunable broadband asymmetric transmission of linearly polarized THz waves can be achieved. When VO2 is in a metallic state, the proposed device acts as a tunable dual-directional absorber with perfect absorption in both illumination directions. In each case, the response can be tuned by varying the Fermi energy of the DSFs. This offers a new pathway for the development of tunable multifunctional THz metamaterial devices.

We introduced photon-trapping microstructures into GeSn-based photodetectors for the first time, and achieved high-efficiency photo detection at 2 µm with a responsivity of 0.11 A/W. The demonstration was realized by a GeSn/Ge multiple-quantum-well (MQW) p-i-n photodiode on a GeOI architecture. Compared with the non-photon-trapping counterparts, the patterning and etching of photon-trapping microstructure can be processed in the same step with mesa structure at no additional cost. A four-fold enhancement of photo response was achieved at 2 µm. Although the incorporation of photo-trapping microstructure degrades the dark current density which increases from 31.5 to 45.2 mA/cm2 at −1 V, it benefits an improved 3-dB bandwidth of 2.7 GHz at bias voltage at −5 V. The optical performance of GeSn/Ge MQW photon-trapping photodetector manifests its great potential as a candidate for efficient 2 µm communication. Additionally, the underlying GeOI platform enables its feasibility of monolithic integration with other photonic components such as waveguide, modulator and (de)multiplexer for…

A strategy of optical temperature sensing was developed by using various thermal quenching of Mn 4+ and Eu 3+ for double perovskite tellurite phosphor in optical thermometers. Herein, SrGdLiTeO 6 (SGLT): Mn 4+ ,Eu 3+ phosphors were synthesized by a high-temperature solid-state reaction method. The temperature-dependent emission spectra indicated that two distinguishable emission peaks originated from Eu 3+ and Mn 4+ exhibited significantly diverse temperature responses. Therefore, optical thermometers with a dual-mode mechanism were designed by employing a fluorescence intensity ratio (FIR) of Mn 4+ ( 2 E g → 4 A 2g ) and Eu 3+ ( 5 D 0 → 7 F 1,2 ) and the decay lifetime of Mn 4+ as the temperature readouts. The temperature sensing of the phosphors ranging from 300 to 550 K were studied. The maximum relative sensitivities (S r ) are obtained as 4.9% K −1 at 550 K. Meanwhile, the 695 nm emission of Mn 4+ possessed a temperature-dependent decay lifetime with S r of 0.229% K −1 at 573 K. Relevant results demonstrate the SrGdLiTeO 6 :Mn 4+ , Eu 3+ phosphor as an optical thermometer…

A transmission hyperspectral microscopic imager (THMI) that utilizes machine learning algorithms for hyperspectral detection of microalgae is presented. The THMI system has excellent performance with spatial and spectral resolutions of 4 µm and 3 nm, respectively. We performed hyperspectral imaging (HSI) of three species of microalgae to verify their absorption characteristics. Transmission spectra were analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) and peak ratio algorithms for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction, and a support vector machine (SVM) model was used for classification. The average accuracy, sensitivity and specificity to distinguish one species from the other two species were found to be 94.4%, 94.4% and 97.2%, respectively. A species identification experiment for a group of mixed microalgae in solution demonstrates the usability of the classification method. Using a random forest (RF) model, the growth stage in a phaeocystis growth cycle cultivated under laboratory conditions was predicted with an accuracy of 98.1%, indicating the feasibility to…

In this study, we designed a novel ultra-wideband (UWB) absorber and numerically analyzed it to demonstrate that its light absorptivity was greater than 90% in the wavelength range of visible light and near-infrared (405-1505 nm). The structure of proposed novel UWB absorber consisted of four layers of films, including silica, titanium, magnesium fluoride, and aluminium, and the upper silica and titanium layers had rectangular cubes in them. For that, the excitations of propagating surface plasmon resonance (PSPR), local surface plasmon resonance (LSPR), and the resonance of Fabry-Perot (FP) cavity were generated at the same time and combined to reach the effect of perfect absorption and ultra-wideband. The proposed absorber had an average absorptivity of 95.14% in the wavelength range of 405 ∼ 1505 nm when the light was under normal incidence. In addition, the UWB absorber was large incident angle insensitive and polarization-independent. The absorber proposed in the paper had great prospects in the fields of thermal electronic equipment, solar power generation, and perfect…

By introducing vanadium dioxide film into a multilayer structure, the dual functionalities of perfect absorption and high transmission are presented using the insulator-to-metal phase transition of vanadium dioxide. When vanadium dioxide is in the conducting state, the designed system acts as a narrowband absorber. The proposed absorber is composed of the top metallic ring, silica spacer, and the vanadium dioxide film. The absorption peak is originated from localized magnetic resonance between metallic ring and vanadium dioxide film. When vanadium dioxide is in the insulating state, the designed system acts as a transparent conducting metal. The top metallic ring, the middle dielectric spacer, and the subwavelength metallic mesh are combined together to form an antireflection coating. The influences of incident angle and structure parameter on absorption and transmission are also discussed. This work has demonstrated a new route for developing vanadium dioxide-based switchable photonic devices in the fields of filter and modulator at terahertz frequencies.

Electrically driven acousto-optic devices that provide beam deflection and optical frequency shifting have broad applications from pulse synthesis to heterodyne detection. Commercially available acousto-optic modulators are based on bulk materials and consume Watts of radio frequency power. Here, we demonstrate an integrated 3-GHz acousto-optic frequency shifter on thin-film lithium niobate, featuring a carrier suppression over 30 dB. Further, we demonstrate a gigahertz-spaced optical frequency comb featuring more than 200 lines over a 0.6-THz optical bandwidth by recirculating the light in an active frequency shifting loop. Our integrated acousto-optic platform leads to the development of on-chip optical routing, isolation, and microwave signal processing.

We present a saline water-based absorber that can offer an extremely wide bandwidth of electromagnetic absorption in the microwave frequency regime. The designed absorber is a hybrid of saline water and Poly Tetra Fluoro Ethylene (PTFE) dielectric material, which exhibits an absorption level greater than 90% across the frequency band from 1.4 to 3.3 and 4.3 to 63 GHz, with a relative absorption bandwidth as high as 180%. Meanwhile, the sensitivity of the absorption against oblique incidence is studied for both TE and TM polarizations. Additionally, the absorption performance of this saline water-based absorber could be tunable by changing the salinity and the combination of different temperatures and salinity. To explain the mechanism, interference theory is employed to investigate the designed absorber, and the theoretically calculated results are well in agreement with the simulation. This design offers an effective and feasible way to construct tunable and ultra-broadband absorber in low-cost stealth technology.

Object classification generally relies on image acquisition and subsequent analysis. Real-time classification of fast-moving objects is a challenging task. Here we propose an approach for real-time classification of fast-moving objects without image acquisition. The key to the approach is to use structured illumination and single-pixel detection to acquire the object features directly. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained to learn the object features. The "learned" object features are then used as structured patterns for structured illumination. Object classification can be achieved by picking up the resulting light signals by a single-pixel detector and feeding the single-pixel measurements to the trained CNN. In our experiments, we show that accurate and real-time classification of fast-moving objects can be achieved. Potential applications of the proposed approach include rapid classification of flowing cells, assembly-line inspection, and aircraft classification in defense applications. Benefiting from the use of a single-pixel detector, the approach might be…

In this work, we present an efficient polarization conversion device via using a hollow graphene metasurface. The platform can simultaneously realize a series of excellent performances, including the broadband x-to-y cross polarization conversion (CPC) function with near unity polarization conversion ratio (PCR), dual-frequency linear-to-circular polarization conversion (LTC-PC) function, and highly sensitive polarization conversion function manipulation under wide oblique incidence angle range. For instance, the proposed device obtains an x-to-y CPC function with the bandwidth up to 1.83 THz (χPCR ≥98.8%). Moreover, the x-to-y CPC function can be switched to LTC-PC function via artificially tuning the Fermi energy of graphene. The maximal frequency shift sensitivity (S) of polarization conversion function reaches 23.09 THz/eV, suggesting a frequency shift of 2.309 THz for the LTC-PC function when the chemical potential is changed by 0.1 eV. Based on these superior performances, the polarization converter can hold potential applications in integrated and compact devices, such as…

In this paper, a hierarchical metamaterial (HMM) is reported to achieve compatible camouflage for laser, thermal infrared detectors, and radar. The HMM consists of an all-metallic metasurface array (AMMA) integrated with a microwave absorber. The top AMMA plays two roles. First, the gradient metasurface can reduce the specular reflection at the laser wavelength of 1.06 µm to less than 5% by tailoring the wavefronts and redirecting the reflected energy to non-specular angles. Second, the AMMA acts as an infrared shielding and microwave transparent layer, ultralow surface emissivity (∼5%) in the infrared atmosphere window of 3-5 µm and 8-14 µm can be realized, and incident microwave can perfectly pass through the top AMMA and then be absorbed by the bottom microwave absorber. The absorption efficiency is over 90% in the broadband of 7-12.7 GHz up to incident angles of 40° for both TE and TM polarizations. These excellent performances indicate that our proposed HMM has promising applications in multispectral camouflage fields.

Aluminum gallium arsenide (AlGaAs) and related III-V semiconductors have excellent optoelectronic properties. They also possess strong material nonlinearity as well as high refractive indices. In view of these properties, AlGaAs is a promising candidate for integrated photonics, including both linear and nonlinear devices, passive and active devices, and associated applications. Low propagation loss is essential for integrated photonics, particularly in nonlinear applications. However, achieving low-loss and high-confinement AlGaAs photonic integrated circuits poses a challenge. Here we show an effective reduction of surface-roughness-induced scattering loss in fully etched high-confinement AlGaAs-on-insulator nanowaveguides by using a heterogeneous wafer-bonding approach and optimizing fabrication techniques. We demonstrate ultrahigh-quality AlGaAs microring resonators and realize quality factors up to 3.52 × 106 and finesses as high as 1.4 × 104. We also show ultra-efficient frequency comb generations in those resonators and achieve record-low threshold powers on the order of ∼20…

Fringe projection profilometry (i.e., FPP) has been one of the most popular 3-D measurement techniques. The phase error due to system random noise becomes non-ignorable when fringes captured by a camera have a low fringe modulation, which are inevitable for objects' surface with un-uniform reflectivity. The phase calculated from these low-modulation fringes may have a non-ignorable phase error and generate 3-D measurement error. Traditional methods reduce the phase error with losing details of 3-D shapes or sacrificing the measurement speed. In this paper, a deep learning-based fringe modulation-enhancing method (i.e., FMEM) is proposed, that transforms two low-modulation fringes with different phase shifts into a set of three phase-shifted high-modulation fringes. FMEM enables to calculate the desired phase from the transformed set of high-modulation fringes, and result in accurate 3-D FPP without sacrificing the speed. Experimental analysis verifies its effectiveness and accurateness.

We report a new microfabrication method of multifocal microlens arrays (MF-MLAs) for extended depth-of-field (DoF) using multilayer photolithography and thermal reflow. Microlenses of different focal lengths were simultaneously fabricated on a single glass wafer by using repeated photolithography with multiple photomasks to define microposts of different thicknesses and concurrent thermal reflow of multi-stacked microposts. The diverse lens curvatures of MF-MLAs are precisely controlled by the thickness of the micropost. Hexagonally packaged MF-MLAs clearly show three different focal lengths of 249 µm, 310 µm, and 460 µm for 200 µm in lens diameter and result in multifocal images on a single image sensor. This method provides a new route for developing various three-dimensional (3D) imaging applications such as light-field cameras or 3D medical endoscopes.

Maxwellian view systems can be employed to circumvent the vergence-accommodation conflict in near-eye displays (NEDs), which directly project images onto the retina regardless of the human eye's depth of focus. However, Maxwellian view optics typically have a limited eyebox, which prevents broader applications of this architecture in NEDs. Here, we demonstrate a thin-film two-dimensional beam deflector composed of multi-twist broad-band Pancharatnam-Berry deflectors to mitigate this limitation via eyebox replication. Based on experimental validation, our proposed design can display always-focused full-color images within a 9 mm × 9 mm eyebox and thus mitigate the limitation of conventional Maxwellian displays while adding negligible weight and volume.

A monolayer graphene metamaterial comprising four graphene strips and four graphene blocks is proposed to produce triple plasmon-induced transparency (PIT) by the interaction of three bright modes and one dark mode. The response of the proposed structure is analyzed by using couple mode theory and finite-difference time-domain simulations, with the results of each method showing close agreement. A quadruple-mode on-to-off modulation based on synchronous or asynchronous switching is realized by tuning the Fermi levels in the graphene, its modulation degrees of amplitude are 77.7%, 58.9%, 75.4%, and 77.6% corresponding to 2.059 THz, 2.865 THz, 3.381 THz, and 3.878 THz, respectively. Moreover, the influence of the polarized light angle on triple-PIT is investigated in detail, demonstrating that the polarization angle affects PIT significantly. As a result, a multi-frequency polarizer is realized, its polarization extinction ratios are 4.2 dB, 7.8 dB, and 12.5 dB. Combined, the insights gained into the synchronous or asynchronous switching and the polarization sensitivity of triple-PIT…

An ultrafast Yb-doped thin-disk multi-pass laser amplifier system with flexible parameters for material processing is reported. We can generate bursts consisting of four pulses at a distance of 20 ns and a total energy of 46.7 mJ at a repetition rate of 25 kHz. In single-pulse operation, 1.5 kW of average output is achieved at 400 kHz when optimizing for a beam quality of M2 = 1.5. Alignment for maximum output power provides 1.9 kW at the same repetition rate. All results are obtained without chirped-pulse amplification in the multi-pass set-up. The application potential of the system is demonstrated exploring its performance in materials processing of dielectrics. Cleaving of 3.8-mm-thick SCHOTT borofloat glass with a velocity of 1200 mm/s is demonstrated with 300 W of input power. Single-pass modification of 30 mm borosilicate glass is enabled with a Bessel beam at 1 kW of average power delivered by four-pulse bursts of an energy of 30 mJ.

An excellently transparent metamaterial-based electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding window with broadband absorption is presented theoretically and demonstrated experimentally. The window is composed of double split circular ring (SCR) elements whose absorption spectra feature two mild resonant peaks. Indium-tin-oxide (ITO) with resonant patterns is utilized as the material to induce high ohmic loss and broaden the absorption bandwidth. The window achieves strong absorptivity, > 90%, covering an ultrawide frequency range of 7.8-18.0 GHz. Moreover, the measured shielding effectiveness (SE) of the window is > 18.25 dB, at 7.0-18.0 GHz, while the average optical transmittance is fixed at ∼73.10% in the visible-near-infrared (Vis-NIR) region of 400-1,500 nm. Further, the absorption mechanism is revealed by designing an equivalent circuit model and studying the distributions of the electric field and surface currents of the structure. Furthermore, a specific design feature also makes our device insensitive to the incident angle and the polarization state of the impinging…

We theoretically show that optical vortices conserve the integer topological charge (TC) when passing through an arbitrary aperture or shifted from the optical axis of an arbitrary axisymmetric carrier beam. If the beam contains a finite number of off-axis optical vortices with same-sign different TC, the resulting TC of the beam is shown to equal the sum of all constituent TCs. If the beam is composed of an on-axis superposition of Laguerre-Gauss modes (n, 0), the resulting TC equals that of the mode with the highest TC. If the highest positive and negative TCs of the constituent modes are equal in magnitude, the "winning" TC is the one with the larger absolute value of the weight coefficient. If the constituent modes have the same weight coefficients, the resulting TC equals zero. If the beam is composed of two on-axis different-amplitude Gaussian vortices with different TC, the resulting TC equals that of the constituent vortex with the larger absolute value of the weight coefficient amplitude, irrespective of the correlation between the individual TCs. In the case of equal…

Manipulating the atomic and electronic structure of matter with strong terahertz (THz) fields while probing the response with ultrafast pulses at x-ray free electron lasers (FELs) has offered unique insights into a multitude of physical phenomena in solid state and atomic physics. Recent upgrades of x-ray FEL facilities are pushing to much higher repetition rates, enabling unprecedented signal-to-noise ratio for pump probe experiments. This requires the development of suitable THz pump sources that are able to deliver intense pulses at compatible repetition rates. Here we present a high-power laser-driven THz source based on optical rectification in LiNbO 3 using tilted pulse front pumping. Our source is driven by a kilowatt-level Yb:YAG amplifier system operating at 100 kHz repetition rate and employing nonlinear spectral broadening and recompression to achieve sub-100 fs pulses with pulse energies up to 7 mJ that are necessary for high THz conversion efficiency and peak field strength. We demonstrate a maximum of 144 mW average THz power (1.44 μ J pulse energy), consisting of…

In this paper we propose a graphene-based metasurface structure that can exhibit tunable electromagnetically-induced-transparency-like (EIT) spectral response at mid-infrared frequencies. The metasurface structure is composed of two subwavelength mono-layer graphene nano-disks coupled with a mono-layer graphene nano-strip. We show that the coupling of the nano-disks' dipole resonance with the quadrupole resonance of the nano-strip can create two split resonances with a transparency window in between at any desired center frequency within a wide frequency range. We show that such an EIT-like response can also be dynamically shifted in frequency by adjusting the Fermi-level of the graphene through external voltage control, which provides convenient post-fabrication tunability. In addition, the performance of such a metastructure for sensing the refractive index of the surrounding medium is analyzed. The simulation results show that its sensitivity can reach 3016.7 nm/(RIU) with a FOM exceeding 12.0. Lastly, we present an analysis of the slow light characteristics of the proposed…

We report on a study of light-induced thermo-elastic effects occurring in quartz tuning forks (QTFs) when exploited as near-infrared light detectors in a tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy sensor setup. Our analysis showed that when the residual laser beam transmitted by the absorption cell is focused on the QTF surface area where the maximum strain field occurs, the QTF signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is proportional to the strain itself and to the QTF accumulation time. The SNR was also evaluated when the pressure surrounding the QTF was lowered from 700 Torr to 5 Torr, resulting in an enhancement factor of ∽4 at the lowest pressure. At 5 torr, the QTF employed as light detector showed an SNR ∽6.5 times higher than that obtained by using a commercially available amplified photodetector.

We propose a new learning-based approach for 3D particle field imaging using holography. Our approach uses a U-net architecture incorporating residual connections, Swish activation, hologram preprocessing, and transfer learning to cope with challenges arising in particle holograms where accurate measurement of individual particles is crucial. Assessments on both synthetic and experimental holograms demonstrate a significant improvement in particle extraction rate, localization accuracy and speed compared to prior methods over a wide range of particle concentrations, including highly dense concentrations where other methods are unsuitable. Our approach can be potentially extended to other types of computational imaging tasks with similar features.

The beam splitters are essential optical components that are widely used in various optical instruments. The robustness of beam splitters is very necessary to all-optical networks. Here we report the design of the topologically protected beam splitter, whose splitting ratio can change flexibly to an arbitrary ratio, such as 50:50, 33:67, 25:75, based on the two-dimensional silicon photonic crystal slab. By using the 50:50 beam splitter, all major logic gates (OR, AND, NOT, XOR, NAND, XNOR, and NOR) are suitably designed with the linear interference approach. Additionally, these devices exhibit robustness even though some disorders exist. It is expected that these robust and compact devices are potentially applicable in optical computing and signal processing.

Ghost imaging in the time domain has opened up new possibilities to retrieve ultrafast waveforms. A pre-requisite to ghost imaging in the time domain is a light source with random temporal intensity fluctuations that are fully uncorrelated over the duration of the temporal waveform being imaged. Here, we show that random fiber lasers are excellent candidates for ghost imaging in the time domain. We study the temporal correlations of the intensity fluctuations of a random fiber laser in different operating regimes and compare its performance in temporal ghost imaging configurations with that of a conventional multi-mode cavity-based fiber laser. Our results demonstrate that random fiber lasers can achieve superior performance for ghost imaging as compared to cavity-based fiber lasers where strong correlations at the cavity round-trip time can yield artefacts for waveforms of long duration.

Glass ceramics (GCs), which consist essentially of a homogeneous solid state dispersion of nanocrystals (NCs) embedded in a chemically inert and mechanically robust glass matrix, appear to be an extremely promising class of solid state materials that can be easily tailored into arbitrary shapes, including a new generation of optical fibers, for efficient incoherent and coherent sources of mid-infrared (MIR) light emission. This unique capability not only stems from the fact that one can tailor the underlying glass matrix for optimal macroscopic physical properties and ultrahigh transparency at the wavelengths of interest (resulting in appropriate "transparent glass ceramics" or TGCs), but also stems from the fact that one can embed these matrices with size and structure-tailored NCs, which in turn can be doped with relatively high concentrations of MIR emitting rare-earth or transition metal ions. This potential is tantamount to the localization of these highly efficient MIR ionic emitters into carefully selected and highly favorable "process-engineered" custom crystalline host…

Herein, we propose a band-limited double-phase method to improve the quality of reconstructed images encoded by double-phase holograms (DPHs) derived from complex-amplitude light waves. Although the quality of images produced by DPHs was improved compared to that of conventional holographic images, it still suffered from degradation because of the spatial shifting noise generated during the conversion from complex-amplitude holograms to phase-only holograms. The proposed method overcomes this shortcoming by defining a band-limiting function according to the spatial distribution of DPHs in the frequency domain to remove the specific spatial frequency components severely affected by the spatial shifting of DPHs. The sharpness of images reconstructed from band-limited DPHs with appropriate optical filtering showed an improvement of 36.84% in simulations and 51.67% in experiments evaluated by 10-90% intensity variation.

A terahertz metasurface consisting of a graphene ribbon and three graphene strips, which can generate a significant triple plasmon-induced transparency (triple-PIT), is proposed to realize a multifunction switch and optical storage. Numerical simulation triple-PIT which is the result of destructive interference between three bright modes and a dark mode can be fitted by coupled mode theory (CMT). The penta-frequency asynchronous and quatary-frequency synchronous switches can be achieved by modulating the graphene Fermi levels. And the switch performance including modulation depth (83.5% < MD < 93.5%) and insertion loss (0.10 dB < IL < 0.26 dB) is great excellent. In addition, the group index of the triple-PIT can be as high as 935, meaning an excellent optical storage is achieved. Thus, the work provides a new method for designing terahertz multi-function switches and optical storages.

Metalens is one of the most prominent applications among metasurfaces since it gives possibilities to replace the conventional lenses for compactness and multi-functionalities. Recently, many studies have been demonstrated to overcome the aberrations of the metalenses for high performance practical applications. Previous studies have used the methods that control the dispersion of meta-atoms for correcting chromatic aberrations and use doublet platform for correcting monochromatic aberrations. Despite these studies and the large demands for simultaneous correction of the aberrations in high numerical aperture metalens, the simultaneous correction has not been demonstrated yet. In this paper, we report the doublet metalens design with high numerical aperture which corrects longitudinal chromatic aberration and four monochromatic aberrations including spherical aberration, coma, astigmatism, and field curvature simultaneously for the three primary visible colors. Based on the novel doublet platform, the multi-wavelength targeted correction lens and geometric phase lens with color…

We report on compact and efficient silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) with low phase-shifter insertion loss of 0.7 dB. The 280 µm-long phase shifters feature a π -voltage-length product of 0.41 Vmm and a loss-efficiency product as small as aUπL = 1.0 VdB. The device performance is demonstrated in a data transmission experiment, where we generate on-off-keying (OOK) and four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4) signals at symbol rates of 100 GBd, resulting in line rates of up to 200 Gbit/s. Bit error ratios are below the threshold for hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) with 7% coding overhead, leading to net data rates of 187 Gbit/s. This is the highest PAM4 data rate ever achieved for a sub-1 mm silicon photonic MZM.

Strong scattering medium brings great difficulties to image objects. Optical memory effect makes it possible to image through strong random scattering medium in a limited angle field-of-view (FOV). The limitation of FOV results in a limited optical memory effect range, which prevents the optical memory effect to be applied to real imaging applications. In this paper, a kind of practical convolutional neural network called PDSNet (Pragmatic De-scatter ConvNet) is constructed to image objects hidden behind different scattering media. The proposed method can expand at least 40 times of the optical memory effect range with a average PSNR above 24dB, and enable to image complex objects in real time, even for objects with untrained scales. The provided experiments can verify its accurateness and efficiency.

In this paper, a broadband and tunable terahertz absorber based on a graphene metasurface in a sandwiched structure is introduced. A single-layered graphene patterned with hollow-out squares is applied in this design, which is continuously connected to provide convenience for electrical tuning and fabrication. Plasmonic coupling and hybridization inside the graphene pattern can significantly enhance the absorption bandwidth. Moreover, polarization-insensitive and omnidirectional performances are also guaranteed by the symmetrical design. Full wave simulations demonstrate that the absorber exhibits over 90% absorbance within 1.14∼3.31 THz with a fractional bandwidth up to 97.5%. The device reveals tunable absorbance from 14% to almost 100% by manipulating the graphene chemical potential from 0 to 0.9 eV. When the incident angle sweeps up to 55°, the absorbance remains more than 90% from 1.77 to 3.42 THz for TE polarization, while over 90% absorbance maintains around 3.3 THz for TM polarization. These superior abilities guarantee the applicability of the presented absorber in THz…

Beam self-imaging in nonlinear graded-index multimode optical fibers is of interest for many applications, such as implementing a fast saturable absorber mechanism in fiber lasers via multimode interference. We obtain a new exact solution for the nonlinear evolution of first and second order moments of a laser beam of arbitrary transverse shape carried by a graded-index multimode fiber. We have experimentally directly visualized the longitudinal evolution of beam self-imaging by means of femtosecond laser pulse propagation in both the anomalous and the normal dispersion regime of a standard telecom graded-index multimode optical fiber. Light scattering out of the fiber core via visible photo-luminescence emission permits us to directly measure the self-imaging period and the beam dynamics. Spatial shift and splitting of the self-imaging process under the action of self-focusing are also revealed.

We demonstrate a high-efficiency achromatic, wide-view Pancharatnam-Berry phase deflector (PBD) based on a three-layer multi-twist structure. A practical method to measure the thickness and twist angle of liquid crystal (LC) polymer films is developed based on Jones matrix of twist-nematic liquid crystals. With the help of this new measurement method, we fabricated a three-layer multi-twist PBD. The imaging performance and the angular response of the achromatic wide-view PBD are also characterized. Potential application of PBD for near-eye displays is foreseeable.

Planar achromatic metalenses with a thickness of the order of wavelength have attracted much attention for their potential applications in ultra-compact optical devices. However, realizing single-layer achromatic metalenses across a wide bandwidth requires that the corresponding meta-atoms have complex cross-sections for correct phase profile and dispersion compensation. Herein, we introduce an effective Abbe number and use lens maker equations to design a dual-layer achromatic metalens in which we compensate the dispersion by using a plano-convex liked metalens combined with a plano-concave liked metalens. The stacked metalens are designed based on simple high refractive index dielectric cylindrical meta-atoms with different radii, which simplify the design and fabrication processes. We demonstrate that a dual-layer achromatic metalens has a small focal length difference across the visible wavelength range and an average focusing efficiency above 50%, which proves that the design method is promising for many potential applications in multi-functional flat optical devices.

This paper presents the performance analysis of a phase error- and loss-tolerant multiport field-programmable MZI-based structure for optical neural networks (ONNs). Compared to the triangular (Reck) mesh, our proposed diamond mesh makes use of a larger number of MZIs, leading to a symmetric topology and adding additional degrees of freedom for the weight matrix optimization in the backpropagation process. Furthermore, the additional MZIs enable the diamond mesh to optimally eliminate the excess light intensity that degrades the performance of the ONNs through the tapered out waveguides. Our results show that the diamond topology is more robust to the inevitable imperfections in practice, i.e., insertion loss of the constituent MZIs and the phase errors. This robustness allows for better classification accuracy in the presence of experimental imperfections. The practical performance and the scalability of the two structures implementing different sizes of optical neural networks are analytically compared. The obtained results confirm that the diamond mesh is more error- and…

film and Ti substrate, is proposed and designed by rigorous coupled wave analysis (RCWA) and genetic algorithm (GA) methods. The optimized structure shows an average absorption of 98.3% in the wavelength range of 300 nm to 2100 nm. Moreover, the metamaterial absorber is polarization-independent and also insensitive to incidence angle for both TM- and TE-polarized waves. The physical mechanisms responsible for nearly perfect broadband absorption, including the Wood's anomaly (WA), cavity resonance (CR), surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) and the resonance of magnetic polaritons (MPs), have been analyzed clearly by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method and the inductor-capacitor (LC) circuit model. Overall, the proposed metamaterial absorber is a promising candidate in solar applications.

We study existence, bifurcation and stability of two-dimensional optical solitons in the framework of fractional nonlinear Schrödinger equation, characterized by its Lévy index, with self-focusing and self-defocusing saturable nonlinearities. We demonstrate that the fractional diffraction system with different Lévy indexes, combined with saturable nonlinearity, supports two-dimensional symmetric, antisymmetric and asymmetric solitons, where the asymmetric solitons emerge by way of symmetry breaking bifurcation. Different scenarios of bifurcations emerge with the change of stability: the branches of asymmetric solitons split off the branches of unstable symmetric solitons with the increase of soliton power and form a supercritical type bifurcation for self-focusing saturable nonlinearity; the branches of asymmetric solitons bifurcates from the branches of unstable antisymmetric solitons for self-defocusing saturable nonlinearity, featuring a convex shape of the bifurcation loops: an antisymmetric soliton loses its stability via a supercritical bifurcation, which is followed by a…

A Michelson interferometric fiber-optic acoustic sensor based on a large-area gold diaphragm is proposed in this paper. The Michelson interferometer (MI) based on 3×3 coupler is comprised of two beams that reflected from the gold diaphragm and a cleaved fiber end face. Thickness and diameter of the gold diaphragm are 300 nm and 2.5 mm, respectively. Based on the phase difference between each output port of the 3×3 fiber coupler, an ellipse fitting differential cross multiplication (EF-DCM) interrogation process is induced for phase demodulation, which can overcome the phase distortion caused by property degradation of 3×3 coupler. Experimental results show that the sensor has a phase sensitivity of about -130.6 dB re 1 rad/μPa@100 Hz. A flat response range between 0.8 to 250 Hz is realized with the sensitivity fluctuation below 0.7 dB. Besides, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and minimal detectable pressure (MDP) of the sensor are 57.9 dB and 10.2 mPa/Hz 1/2 at 5 Hz. The proposed sensor exhibits superiorities of compact size, high sensitivity, flat low-frequency response and ease of…

We create and isolate single-photon emitters with a high brightness approaching 105 counts per second in commercial silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers. The emission occurs in the infrared spectral range with a spectrally narrow zero phonon line in the telecom O-band and shows a high photostability even after days of continuous operation. The origin of the emitters is attributed to one of the carbon-related color centers in silicon, the so-called G center, allowing purification with the 12C and 28Si isotopes. Furthermore, we envision a concept of a highly-coherent scalable quantum photonic platform, where single-photon sources, waveguides and detectors are integrated on an SOI chip. Our results provide a route towards the implementation of quantum processors, repeaters and sensors compatible with the present-day silicon technology.

Metamaterial absorbers have attracted great attention over the past few years and exhibited a promising prospect in solar energy harvesting and solar thermophotovoltaics (STPVs). In this work, we introduce a solar absorber scheme, which enables efficient solar irradiance harvesting, superb thermal robustness and high solar thermal energy conversion for STPV systems. The optimum structure demonstrates an average absorbance of 97.85% at the spectral region from 200 nm to 2980 nm, indicating the near-unity absorption in the main energy range of the solar radiance. The solar-thermal conversion efficiencies surpassing 90% are achieved over an ultra-wide temperature range (100-800 °C). Meanwhile, the analysis indicates that this metamaterial has strong tolerance for fabrication errors. By utilizing the simple two-dimensional (2D) titanium (Ti) gratings, this design is able to get beyond the limit of costly and sophisticated nanomanufacturing techniques. These impressive features can hold the system with wide applications in metamaterial and other optoelectronic devices.

In this paper, we propose a graphene-based metasurface that exhibits multifunctions including tunable filter and slow-light which result from surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) of graphene and plasmon induced transparency (PIT), respectively. The proposed metasurface is composed by two pairs of graphene nano-rings and a graphene nanoribbon. Each group of graphene rings is separately placed on both sides of the graphene nanoribbon. Adjusting the working state of the nanoribbon can realize the functional conversion of the proposed multifunctional metasurface. After that, in the state of two narrow filters, we put forward the application concept of dual-channel optical switch. Using phase modulation of PIT and flexible Fermi level of graphene, we can achieve tunable slow light. In addition, the result shows that the graphene-based metasurface as a refractive index sensor can achieve a sensitivity of 13670 nm/RIU in terahertz range. These results enable the proposed device to be widely applied in tunable optical switches, slow light, and sensors.

In this paper, we report a high power single frequency 1030 nm fiber laser with near-diffraction-limited beam quality based on a polarization-maintaining tapered Yb-doped fiber (T-YDF). The T-YDF has advantages of effectively suppressing stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) while maintaining good beam quality. As a result, a record output power of 379 W single frequency, linearly polarized, nearly single-mode fiber amplifier operating at 1030 nm is demonstrated. The polarization extinction ratio is as high as 16.3 dB, and the M 2 is measured to be 1.12. Further, the dependence of the thermal-induced mode instability (TMI) threshold on the polarization state of an input signal laser is investigated for the first time. By changing the polarization state of the injected seed laser, the output power can increase to 550 W while the beam quality can be maintained well (M 2 =1.47). The slope efficiency of the whole amplifier is about 80%. No sign of SBS appears even at the highest output power and the further brightness scaling of both situations is limited by the TMI effect. To the best…

We present a theoretical study on the plasmonic response of borophene, a monolayer 2D material that is predicted to exhibit metallic response and anisotropic plasmonic behavior in visible wavelengths. We investigate plasmonic properties of borophene thin films as well as borophene nanoribbons and nanopatches where polarization-sensitive absorption values in the order of 50% is obtained with monolayer borophene. It is demonstrated that by adding a metal layer, this absorption can be enhanced to 100%. We also examine giant dichroism in monolayer borophene which can be tuned passively (patterning) and actively (electrostatic gating) and our simulations yield 20% reflected light with significant polarization rotation. These findings reveal the potential of borophene in the manipulation of phase, amplitude and polarization of light at the extreme subwavelength scales.

Researches on the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) need accurate measurements with high temporal and spatial resolutions from a series of different instruments. Here, a method for identifying cloud, precipitation, windshear, and turbulence in the ABL using a single coherent Doppler wind lidar (CDWL) is proposed and demonstrated. Based on deep analysis of the power spectrum of the backscattering signal, multiple lidar products, such as carrier-to-noise (CNR), spectrum width, spectrum skewness, turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate (TKEDR), and shear intensity are derived for weather identification. Firstly, the cloud is extracted by Haar wavelet covariance transform (HWCT) algorithm based on the CNR after range correction. Secondly, since the spectrum broadening may be due to turbulence, windshear or precipitation, the spectrum skewness is introduced to distinguish the precipitation from two other conditions. Whereas wind velocity is obtained by single peak fitting in clear weather condition, the double-peak fitting is used to retrieve wind and rainfall velocities simultaneously…

Calibrating the extrinsic parameters on a system of 3D Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) and the monocular camera is a challenging task, because accurate 3D-2D or 3D-3D point correspondences are hard to establish from the sparse LiDAR point clouds in the calibration procedure. In this paper, we propose a geometric calibration method for estimating the extrinsic parameters of the LiDAR-camera system. In this method, a novel combination of planar boards with chessboard patterns and auxiliary calibration objects are proposed. The planar chessboard provides 3D-2D and 3D-3D point correspondences. Auxiliary calibration objects provide extra constraints for stable calibration results. After that, a novel geometric optimization framework is proposed to utilize these point correspondences, thus leading calibration results robust to LiDAR sensor noise. Besides, we contribute an automatic approach to extract point clouds of calibration objects. In the experiments, our method has a superior performance over state-of-the-art calibration methods. Furthermore, we verify our method by computing…

Fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has become increasingly important in dynamic 3-D shape measurement. In FPP, it is necessary to retrieve the phase of the measured object before shape profiling. However, traditional phase retrieval techniques often require a large number of fringes, which may generate motion-induced error for dynamic objects. In this paper, a novel phase retrieval technique based on deep learning is proposed, which uses an end-to-end deep convolution neural network to transform a single or two fringes into the phase retrieval required fringes. When the object's surface is located in a restricted depth, the presented network only requires a single fringe as the input, which otherwise requires two fringes in an unrestricted depth. The proposed phase retrieval technique is first theoretically analyzed, and then numerically and experimentally verified on its applicability for dynamic 3-D measurement.

We propose and demonstrate an external-feedback semiconductor laser-based chaos generation scheme supporting simultaneous bandwidth enhancement and excellent time-delay-signature (TDS) suppression, by using parallel-coupling ring resonators (PCRR) as reflector. The characteristics of effective bandwidth and TDS of chaotic signals generated in three indicative PCRR configurations are thoroughly investigated. The numerical results demonstrate that with the nonlinear feedback of PCRR, the TDS of chaos can be efficiently suppressed toward an indistinguishable level, and the bandwidth of chaos in the proposed scheme can also be enhanced, with respect to the conventional optical feedback configuration. The proposed scheme shows a flexible way to generate wideband complex chaos.

General two-dimensional (2D) material-based systems that achieve plasmonically induced transparency (PIT) are limited to isotropic graphene only through unidirectional bright-dark mode interaction. Moreover, it is challenging to extend these devices to anisotropic 2D films. In this study, we exploit surface plasmons excited at two crossed grating layers, which can be formed either by dielectric gratings or by the 2D sheet itself, to achieve dynamically tunable PIT in both isotropic and anisotropic 2D materials. Here, each grating simultaneously acts as both bright and dark modes. By taking isotropic graphene and anisotropic black phosphorus (BP) as proofs of concept, we reveal that this PIT can result from either unidirectional bright-dark or bidirectional bright-bright and bright-dark mode hybridized couplings when the incident light is parallelly/perpendicularly or obliquely polarized to the gratings, respectively. Identical grating parameters in isotropic (crossed lattice directions in anisotropic) layers produce polarization-independent single-window PIT, whereas different…