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Supercontinuum
In optics, a supercontinuum is formed when a collection of nonlinear processes act together upon a pump beam in order to cause severe spectral broadening of the original pump beam, for example using a microstructured optical fiber. The result is a smooth spectral continuum (see figure 1 for a typical example). There is no consensus on how much broadening constitutes a supercontinuum; however researchers have published work claiming as little as 60 nm of broadening as a supercontinuum. There is also no agreement on the spectral flatness required to define the bandwidth of the source, with authors using anything from 5 dB to 40 dB or more. In addition the term supercontinuum itself did not gain widespread acceptance until this century, with many authors using alternative phrases to describe their continua during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In the decade leading up to 2014, the development of supercontinua sources emerged as a research field. This is largely due ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supercontinuum In A Microstructured Optical Fiber
In optics, a supercontinuum is formed when a collection of nonlinear optics#Nonlinear optical processes, nonlinear processes act together upon a pump beam in order to cause severe spectral broadening of the original pump beam, for example using a microstructured optical fiber. The result is a smooth spectral continuum (see figure 1 for a typical example). There is no consensus on how much broadening constitutes a supercontinuum; however researchers have published work claiming as little as 60 nm of broadening as a supercontinuum. There is also no agreement on the spectral flatness required to define the bandwidth of the source, with authors using anything from 5 dB to 40 dB or more. In addition the term supercontinuum itself did not gain widespread acceptance until this century, with many authors using alternative phrases to describe their continua during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In the decade leading up to 2014, the development of supercontinua sources emerg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supercontinuum For Gradually Increasing Laser Intensity
In optics, a supercontinuum is formed when a collection of nonlinear processes act together upon a pump beam in order to cause severe spectral broadening of the original pump beam, for example using a microstructured optical fiber. The result is a smooth spectral continuum (see figure 1 for a typical example). There is no consensus on how much broadening constitutes a supercontinuum; however researchers have published work claiming as little as 60 nm of broadening as a supercontinuum. There is also no agreement on the spectral flatness required to define the bandwidth of the source, with authors using anything from 5 dB to 40 dB or more. In addition the term supercontinuum itself did not gain widespread acceptance until this century, with many authors using alternative phrases to describe their continua during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In the decade leading up to 2014, the development of supercontinua sources emerged as a research field. This is largely due ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Alfano
Robert Alfano is an Italian-American experimental physicist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering at the City College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers (1982). He is a pioneer in the fields of Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy, Ultrafast lasers and optics, tunable lasers, semiconductor materials and devices, optical materials, biophysics, nonlinear optics and photonics; he has also worked extensively in nanotechnology and coherent backscattering. His discovery of the white-light supercontinuum laser is at the root of optical coherence tomography, which is breaking barriers in ophthalmology, cardiology, and oral cancer detection (see "Better resolution with multibeam OCT," page 28) among other applications. He initiated the field known now as optical biopsy. He recently calculated he has brought in $162 million worth of funding to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-phase Modulation
Self-phase modulation (SPM) is a nonlinear optics, nonlinear optical effect of light–matter interaction. An ultrashort pulse of light, when travelling in a medium, will induce a varying refractive index of the medium due to the optical Kerr effect. This variation in refractive index will produce a phase (waves), phase shift in the pulse, leading to a change of the pulse's frequency spectrum. Self-phase modulation is an important effect in optics, optical systems that use short, intense pulses of light, such as lasers and optical fiber communications systems. Self-phase modulation has also been reported for nonlinear acoustics, nonlinear sound waves propagating in biological thin films, where the phase modulation results from varying elastic properties of the lipid films. Theory with Kerr nonlinearity The evolution along distance ''z'' of the equivalent lowpass signal, equivalent lowpass electric field ''A(z)'' obeys the nonlinear Schrödinger equation which, in absence of disper ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Raman Scattering
In chemistry and physics, Raman scattering or the Raman effect () is the inelastic scattering of photons by matter, meaning that there is both an exchange of energy and a change in the light's direction. Typically this effect involves vibrational energy being gained by a molecule as incident photons from a visible laser are shifted to lower energy. This is called ''normal Stokes-Raman scattering''. Light has a certain probability of being scattered by a material. When photons are scattered, most of them are elastic scattering, elastically scattered (Rayleigh scattering), such that the scattered photons have the same energy (frequency, wavelength, and therefore color) as the incident photons, but different direction. Rayleigh scattering usually has an intensity in the range 0.1% to 0.01% relative to that of a radiation source. An even smaller fraction of the scattered photons (about 1 in a million) can be scattered ''inelastically'', with the scattered photons having an energy di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optical Coherence Tomography
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a high-resolution imaging technique with most of its applications in medicine and biology. OCT uses coherent near-infrared light to obtain micrometer-level depth resolved images of biological tissue or other scattering media. It uses interferometry techniques to detect the amplitude and time-of-flight of reflected light. OCT uses transverse sample scanning of the light beam to obtain two- and three-dimensional images. Short-coherence-length light can be obtained using a superluminescent diode (SLD) with a broad spectral bandwidth or a broadly tunable laser with narrow linewidth. The first demonstration of OCT imaging (in vitro) was published by a team from MIT and Harvard Medical School in a 1991 article in the journal ''Science (journal), Science''. The article introduced the term "OCT" to credit its derivation from optical coherence-domain reflectometry, in which the axial resolution is based on temporal coherence. The first demonstrat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Four-wave Mixing
Four-wave mixing (FWM) is an intermodulation phenomenon in nonlinear optics, whereby interactions between two or three wavelengths produce two or one new wavelengths. It is similar to the third-order intercept point in electrical systems. Four-wave mixing can be compared to the intermodulation distortion in standard electrical systems. It is a parametric nonlinear process, in that the energy of the incoming photons is conservation of energy, conserved. FWM is a phase-sensitive process, in that the efficiency of the process is strongly affected by Nonlinear optics#Phase matching, phase matching conditions. Mechanism When three frequencies (f1, f2, and f3) interact in a nonlinear medium, they give rise to a fourth frequency (f4) which is formed by the scattering of the incident photons, producing the fourth photon. Given inputs ''f1, f2,'' and ''f3'', the nonlinear system will produce : \pm f_ \pm f_ \pm f_ From calculations with the three input signals, it is found that 12 inte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slowly Varying Envelope Approximation
In physics, slowly varying envelope approximation (SVEA, sometimes also called slowly varying asymmetric approximation or SVAA) is the assumption that the envelope of a forward-travelling wave pulse varies slowly in time and space compared to a period or wavelength. This requires the spectrum of the signal to be narrow-banded—hence it is also referred to as the narrow-band approximation. The slowly varying envelope approximation is often used because the resulting equations are in many cases easier to solve than the original equations, reducing the order of—all or some of—the highest-order partial derivatives. But the validity of the assumptions which are made need to be justified. Example For example, consider the electromagnetic wave equation: \nabla^2 E - \frac \frac = 0\, , where c = \frac ~. If and are the wave number and angular frequency of the (characteristic) carrier wave for the signal , the following representation is useful: E(\mathbf,t) = \operator ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phosphosilicate Glass
Phosphosilicate glass, commonly referred to by the acronym PSG, is a silicate glass commonly used in semiconductor device fabrication for intermetal layers, i.e., insulating layers deposited between succeedingly higher metal or conducting layers, due to its effect in gettering alkali ions. Another common type of phosphosilicate glass is borophosphosilicate glass (BPSG). Soda-lime phosphosilicate glasses also form the basis for bioactive glasses (e.g. Bioglass), a family of materials which chemically convert to mineralised bone (hydroxy-carbonate-apatite) in physiological fluid. Bismuth doped phosphosilicate glasses are being explored for use as the active gain medium in fiber lasers for fiber-optic communication. See also * Wafer (electronics) In electronics, a wafer (also called a slice or substrate) is a thin slice of semiconductor, such as a crystalline silicon (c-Si, silicium), used for Semiconductor device fabrication, the fabrication of integrated circuits and, in ph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optical Soliton
In optics, the term soliton is used to refer to any optical field that does not change during propagation because of a delicate balance between nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium. There are two main kinds of solitons: * spatial solitons: the nonlinear effect can balance the dispersion. The electromagnetic field can change the refractive index of the medium while propagating, thus creating a structure similar to a graded-index fiber. If the field is also a propagating mode of the guide it has created, then it will remain confined and it will propagate without changing its shape * temporal solitons: if the electromagnetic field is already spatially confined, it is possible to send pulses that will not change their shape because the nonlinear effects will balance the dispersion. Those solitons were discovered first and they are often simply referred as "solitons" in optics. *Spatial solitons* In order to understand how a spatial soliton can exist, we have to make some c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multimode Fibre
Multi-mode optical fiber is a type of optical fiber mostly used for communication over short distances, such as within a building or on a campus. Multi-mode links can be used for data rates up to 800 Gbit/s. Multi-mode fiber has a fairly large core diameter that enables multiple light modes to be propagated and limits the maximum length of a transmission link because of modal dispersion. The standard G.651.1 defines the most widely used forms of multi-mode optical fiber. Applications The equipment used for communications over multi-mode optical fiber is less expensive than that for single-mode optical fiber. Typical transmission speed and distance limits are 100 Mbit/s for distances up to 2 km (100BASE-FX), 1 Gbit/s up to 1000 m, and 10 Gbit/s up to 550 m. Because of its high capacity and reliability, multi-mode optical fiber generally is used for backbone applications in buildings. An increasing number of users are taking the benefits of fi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Q-switching
Q-switching, sometimes known as giant pulse formation or Q-spoiling, is a technique by which a laser can be made to produce a pulsed output beam. The technique allows the production of light pulses with extremely high (gigawatt) peak power, much higher than would be produced by the same laser if it were operating in a continuous wave (constant output) mode. Compared to mode locking, another technique for pulse generation with lasers, Q-switching leads to much lower pulse repetition rates, much higher pulse energies, and much longer pulse durations. The two techniques are sometimes applied together. Q-switching was first proposed in 1958 by Gordon Gould, p. 93. and independently discovered and demonstrated in 1961 or 1962 by R.W. Hellwarth and F.J. McClung at Hughes Research Laboratories using electrically switched Kerr cell shutters in a ruby laser. Optical nonlinearities such as Q-switching were fully explained by Nicolaas Bloembergen, who won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for this w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
