Contents
2019
Volume: 17 Issue 1
18 Article(s)

Export citation format
Reviews
Optical devices
Compact solid-state waveguide lasers operating in the pulsed regime: a review [Invited]
Yuechen Jia, and Feng Chen
Over the last years, there has been tremendous progress with compact pulsed lasers based on various solid-state gain media, such as crystals and glasses doped with laser-active ions. With the integration of increasingly diverse saturable absorber materials, these small sources are capable of delivering stable pulses with durations as short as femtoseconds and repetition rates exceeding 10 GHz. These promising sources are known as solid-state waveguide lasers, which have become synonymous with miniaturization, integration, and functionality. This article overviews the progress in the development of passively Q-switched and mode-locked solid-state waveguide lasers employing diverse saturable absorbers. The most commonly used laser configurations, state-of-the-art waveguide fabrication techniques, and experimental demonstrations of pulsed waveguide lasers are summarized and reviewed. Selected well-noted topics, which may shape the future directions in this field, are also presented.
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 012302 (2019)
Optoelectronics
Nonlinear polaritons in metamaterials with plasmon-induced transparency [Invited] | Editors' Pick
Zhengyang Bai, Qi Zhang, and Guoxiang Huang
Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), a typical quantum interference effect, has been extensively investigated in coherent atomic gases. In recent years, it has been recognized that the plasmonic analog of atomic EIT, called plasmon-induced transparency (PIT), is a fruitful platform for the study of EIT-like propagation and interaction of plasmonic polaritons. Many proposals have been presented for realizing PIT in various metamaterials, which possess many unique characters, including the suppression of absorption of electromagnetic radiation, the reduction of propagation velocity, etc. Especially, nonlinear PIT metamaterials, obtained usually by embedding nonlinear elements into meta-atoms, can be used to acquire an enhanced Kerr effect resulted from the resonant coupling between radiation and the meta-atoms and to actively manipulate structural and dynamical properties of plasmonic metamaterials. In this article, we review recent research progress in nonlinear PIT metamaterials, and elucidate their interesting properties and promising applications. In particular, we give a detailed description on the propagation and interaction of nonlinear plasmonic polaritons in metamaterials via PIT, which are promising for chip-scale applications in information processing and transmission.
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 012501 (2019)
Research Articles
Diffraction and Gratings
Perfect absorption in a monolayer graphene at the near-infrared using a compound waveguide grating by robust critical coupling
Jinhua Hu, Jia Fu, Xiuhong Liu, Danping Ren, Jijun Zhao, and Yongqing Huang
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 010501 (2019)
Fiber Optics and Optical Communications
High-sensitivity FBG microphone with static pressure equalization and optimized response
Faxiang Zhang, Chang Wang, Xiaolei Zhang, Shaodong Jiang, Jiasheng Ni, and Gangding Peng
We present a high-sensitivity fiber Bragg grating (FBG)-based microphone with a flat response and static pressure equalization. A very high dynamic sensitivity of the microphone is achieved by a pressure sensing structure based on a carbon fiber diaphragm. Static pressure equalization is realized by a balance structure with a capillary glass tube. The resonances of the sensor are suppressed by air damping structures, and a broadened flat response is achieved. An acoustic-solid interaction model was used to analyze the response characteristics of the microphone. An experimental prototype was produced and tested, and the results are well consistent with the design. The tested sensitivity was 10 dB re 1 pm/Pa from 10 Hz to 2.5 kHz with a fluctuation of less than ±1.5 dB. Combined with the phase-generated-carrier-based coherent detection scheme, the microphone can achieve a sound resolution of the milli-pascal level. The static pressure sensitivity is measured to be 0.27 pm/atm, which is 100 dB lower than the dynamic sensitivity.
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 010601 (2019)
Doping radius effects on an erbium-doped fiber amplifier
Md. Ziaul Amin, Khurram Karim Qureshi, and Md. Mahbub Hossain
In an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), erbium ions act as a three-level system. Therefore, much higher pump energy is required to achieve the population inversion in an erbium-doped fiber (EDF). This higher pump energy requirement complicates the efficient design of an EDFA. However, efficient use of the pump power can improve the EDFA performance. The improved performance of an EDFA can be obtained by reducing the doping radius of the EDF. A smaller doping radius increases pump–dopant interactions and subsequently increases the pump–photon conversion efficiency. Decreasing the doping radius allows a larger proportion of dopant ions, which are concentrated near the core, to interact with the highest pump intensity. However, decreasing the doping radius beyond a certain limit will bring the dopant ions much closer and introduce detrimental ion–ion interaction effects. In this Letter, we show that an optimal doping radius in an EDF can provide the best gain performance. Moreover, we have simulated the well-known numerical aperture effects on EDFA gain performance to support our claim.
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 010602 (2019)
High-efficiency DBA-BOTDA with optimized SNR by multiple bandwidths pump modulation
Huiliang Ma, Xinhong Jia, Kai Lin, and Cong Xu
For Brillouin optical time-domain analysis (BOTDA) based on distributed Brillouin amplification (DBA), constant Brillouin response achieved by the exponentially variable bandwidth/intensity pump modulation suffers from the much lower pumping efficiency for long-range sensing, which counterbalances the merit of DBA. In this Letter, pump modulation by multiple constant bandwidths was proposed and demonstrated. The ~98.9 km sensing with ~5 m spatial resolution and no use of optical pulse coding (OPC) was achieved by ~8 dBm Brillouin pump, which is lower by ~9 dB in theory by comparison with exponentially increased bandwidth modulation. Compared with traditional DBA-BOTDA, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enhancement with >4.6 dB was obtained. The flattened standard deviation (STD) of Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) (less than ~2 MHz) along the whole fiber was demonstrated.
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 010603 (2019)
Switchable multi-wavelength erbium-doped fiber laser based on a four-mode FBG
Yong Zhou, Panyun Gao, Xiu Zhang, Peng Wang, Liang Chen, and Weiqing Gao
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 010604 (2019)
Application of Kramers–Kronig receiver in SSB-OFDM-RoF link
Yuancheng Cai, Yun Ling, Xiang Gao, Bo Xu, and Kun Qiu
We propose and investigate the use of a Kramers–Kronig (KK) receiver in a single sideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing radio over fiber (SSB-OFDM-RoF) link based on an optical remote heterodyne solution. This scheme is effective in eliminating the signal-to-signal beating interference introduced by square-law detection of a photo-detector in an SSB-OFDM-RoF link. We extensively study the influences of different carrier-to-signal power ratios (CSPRs), laser linewidths, and transmission distances on our proposed scheme. It is proved that the KK-based receiver can reduce optimal CSPR by more than 5 dB and provide about 1.1 dB gain over the conventional mixer-based receiver scheme with CSPR of 11 dB after 75 km fiber transmission.
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 010605 (2019)
Imaging Systems
Instrumentation, measurement, and metrology
Imaging method of single layer graphene on metal substrate based on imaging ellipsometer with large field of view
Guiyun Li, Liyuan Gu, Jingpei Hu, Linglin Zhu, Aijun Zeng, and Huijie Huang
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 011201 (2019)
Method for simultaneously and directly measuring all six-DOF motion errors of a rotary axis
Jiakun Li, Qibo Feng, Chuanchen Bao, and Bin Zhang
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 011203 (2019)
Participation in the absolute gravity comparison with a compact cold atom gravimeter | On the Cover
Zhijie Fu, Qiyu Wang, Zhaoying Wang, Bin Wu, Bing Cheng, and Qiang Lin
The first Asia-Pacific Comparison of Absolute Gravimeters (APMP.M.G-K1) was organized by the National Institute of Metrology (NIM) of China from December 21, 2015 to March 25, 2016 in Changping, Beijing. Our compact cold atom gravimeter (CCAG) was transported from Hangzhou to Beijing with a long distance of about 1200 km to participate in this comparison. The CCAG is the only one, to the best of our knowledge, that is based on the principle of atom interferometry among all the instruments. Absolute gravity in the indicated three test sites has been measured as requested by the organizer. The sensitivity of our CCAG is estimated to be 90 μGal/Hz, even when the measurements are carried out without any vibration isolation. Besides, the accuracy of this gravimeter has been evaluated to be about 19 μGal by considering the significant system errors. Our results show a good agreement with the given reference value.
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 011204 (2019)
Lasers and Laser Optics
Medical optics and biotechnology
Automated segmentation of optical coherence tomography images
C. Kharmyssov, M. W. L. Ko, and J. R. Kim
We propose a fast and accurate automated algorithm to segment retinal pigment epithelium and internal limiting membrane layers from spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SDOCT) B-scan images. A hybrid algorithm, which combines intensity thresholding and graph-based algorithms, was used to process and analyze SDOCT radial scans (120 B scans) images obtained from twenty patients. The relative difference in position of the layers segmented by the proposed hybrid algorithm and by the clinical expert was 1.49% ± 0.01%. The processing time of the hybrid algorithm was 9.3 s for six B scans. Dice’s coefficient of the hybrid algorithm was 96.7% ± 1.6%. The proposed hybrid algorithm for the segmentation of SDOCT images had good agreement with manual segmentation and reduced processing time.
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 011701 (2019)
Optical devices
Electrically tunable holographic waveguide display based on holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystal grating
Zhihui Diao, Lingsheng Kong, Junliang Yan, Junda Guo, Xiaofeng Liu, Li Xuan, and Lei Yu
In this Letter, we present an electrically tunable holographic waveguide display (HWD) based on two slanted holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystal (HPDLC) gratings. Experimental results show that a see-through effect is obtained in the HWD that both the display light from HWD and the ambient light can be clearly seen simultaneously. By applying an external electric field, the output intensity of the display light can be modulated, which is attributed to the field-induced rotation of the liquid crystal molecules in the two HPDLC gratings. We also show that this electrically tunable performance enables the HWD to adapt to different ambient light conditions. This study provides some ideas towards the development of HWD and its application in augmented reality.
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 012301 (2019)
Physical Optics
Polarization imaging in atmospheric environment based on polarized reflectance retrieval
Huijie Zhao, Jian Xing, Xingfa Gu, and Guorui Jia
Chinese Optics Letters
  • Publication Date: Jan. 10, 2019
  • Vol. 17, Issue 1, 012601 (2019)