Optical technologies have been widely studied to satisfy the interconnect demand in high-performance computers and data centers, and free-space optical interconnects have been investigated for flexible card-to-card applications. To increase the interconnect speed and range, in this Letter we propose a reconfigurable free-space optical interconnect with 16-carrierless-amplitude-phase (16-CAP) symbol

In this Letter, a bidirectional amplifier configuration suppressing the relative intensity noise in a 1950-nm linearly polarized single-frequency fiber laser (SFFL) is proposed. The scheme to amplify the signal in a nonlinear saturated amplification regime with low gain distribution for suppressing the RIN is theoretically analyzed. By optimizing the input power level and reflectivity of the bidirectional

A flexible broadband absorber based on an all-dielectric multilayer structure is proposed to get an average absorbance of 97.4%, covering the whole visible light. Additionally, such high absorption presents an extraordinary angular tolerance of up to ${\pm}{{50}}^\circ$. Due to the single broadband resonance in the highly lossy Fabry–Perot (F–P) cavity and the intrinsic loss property of Ge, the proposed

Huygens metasurface, as a subcategory of metamaterials, shows great potential in the capacity and efficiency of electromagnetic wave manipulation within a subwavelength scale. Here, the transmission-type Huygens metasurface is demonstrated for complete and independent control of orthogonally polarized transmitted waves by constructing pairs of crossed electric and magnetic resonances in three-sheet

Inducing and controlling temperature gradients in illuminated subwavelength plasmonic structures is a challenging task. Here, we present a strategy to remotely induce and tune temperature gradients in a subwavelength metallic nanocone by adjusting the angle of incidence of linearly polarized continuous-wave illumination. We demonstrate, through rigorous three-dimensional numerical simulations, that

A novel, to the best of our knowledge, approach to the design of the single-photon sources emitting in the spectral regions of 1060 and 1337 nm was developed. A unique hybrid structure based on colloidal CdSe/CdS/ZnS nanocrystals and neodymium(III) 1,3-diketonate was created. Direct energy transfer from the CdSe/CdS/ZnS single nanocrystal to the near-infrared (NIR) luminescent Nd(III) complex was observed

Using induced UV attenuation across a twisted fiber asymmetric core drawn from a 3D printed preform, linear fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) are produced on one side of the core. By removing the twist, a helical grating with a period matching the twist rate is produced. Balancing the rate with the polarization beat length in a form birefringent fiber allows the production of a combined rocking filter and

An analogous laser action of magnons has become a subject of interest, and it is crucial for the study of nonlinear magnons spintronics. In this Letter, we demonstrate the magnon laser behavior based on Brillouin light scattering in a ferrimagnetic insulator sphere, which supports optical whispering gallery modes and magnon resonances. We show that the excited magnon plays what has traditionally been

We show that waveguide sensors can enable a quantitative characterization of coronavirus spike glycoprotein–host-receptor binding—the process whereby coronaviruses enter human cells, causing disease. We demonstrate that such sensors can help quantify and eventually understand kinetic and thermodynamic properties of viruses that control their affinity to targeted cells, which is known to significantly

The aliasing effect in the discrete Fourier transform inherent will impose a serious detrimental effect on conventional phase retrieval measurement accuracy with under-sampled intensity. In this Letter, we describe a modal-based nonlinear optimization phase retrieval approach that is capable of retrieving wavefront measurements using under-sampled intensities. The extended Nijboer–Zernike theory is

A new technique for the fast implementation of Brillouin optical time-domain reflectometry has been proposed and demonstrated with the optical chirp chain (OCC) reference wave. By using the fixed bandpass filter and envelope detection, the spontaneous Brillouin spectrum can be online demodulated in the time domain for truly distributed, one-end access and fast measurement. The measurement time is only

We experimentally study the coherence time of a below-threshold Raman laser in which the gain medium is a gas of magneto-optically trapped atoms. The second-order optical coherence exhibits photon bunching with a correlation time that is varied by two orders of magnitude by controlling the gain. Results are in good agreement with a simple analytic model that suggests the effect is dominated by gain

Fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) with various interrogation schemes to estimate the FBG’s spectrum shift have been widely used in fiber sensing systems. Wavelength swept laser (WSL) based interrogation architectures have been proposed to offer rapid and high-quality sensing performance. However, for getting higher sensing accuracy, the demands for high-performance WSL may push the system cost. Under these

When the spatial frequencies of the object are insufficiently sampled, the reconstruction of ghost imaging will suffer from repetitive visual artifacts, which cannot be effectively tackled by existing ghost imaging reconstruction techniques. In this Letter, extensions of the CLEAN algorithm applied in ghost imaging are explored to eliminate those artifacts. Combined with the point spread function estimation

The selective excitation of localized surface wave modes remains a challenge in the design of both leaky-wave and bound-wave devices. In this Letter, we show how the truncation of a metasurface can play an important role in breaking the spatial inversion symmetry in the excitation of surface waves supported by the structure. This is done by combining a large anisotropy in the dispersion relation and

The formation of birefringent structures inside nanoporous glass by femtosecond laser pulses was investigated. The laser-modified region is shown to be a cavity whose shape depends on the number of pulses. The shape of the void cross section varied from circle to ellipse when increasing the number of pulses from one to three. A layer of non-porous dense glass was revealed around the cavity. The cross

Material design and input field properties limit high-harmonic excitation efficiency of surface-plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in a nanoscopic device. We remedy these limitations by developing a concept for a plasmonic waveguide that exploits spatiotemporal control of a weak surface polaritonic field to create efficient four-wave mixing (FWM) and periodic phase singularities. Our configuration comprises

We investigate the possibility to attain strongly confined atomic localization using interacting Rydberg atoms in a coherent population trapping ladder configuration, where a standing-wave is used as a coupling field in the second leg of the ladder. Depending on the degree of compensation for the Rydberg level energy shift induced by the van der Waals interaction, by the coupling field detuning, we

The first results of the study on photobleaching and thermally induced recovery in Bi-doped phosphosilicate fiber have been presented. It was revealed that the rate of bleaching of phosphor-related Bi active center (BAC-P) becomes slower with the decrease of photon energy. The quadratic dependence of the bleaching rate of BAC-P on laser power is obtained under 532 nm laser irradiation. The effect of

We report a new, to the best of our knowledge, record power and efficiency for a 946 nm Nd:YAG laser, producing ${\gt}{110}\;{\rm W}$ (${5}\;{{\rm TWm}^{- 2}}\;{{\rm sr}^{- 1}}$) with a slope efficiency of 80%, with respect to absorbed pump power, and an optical-to-optical efficiency of 74%, with respect to incident power. To achieve this performance, we utilized a closed-cycle acoustic Stirling cryostat

We present an all-passive efficient KGW Raman laser with an external-cavity configuration in the 2 µm spectral regime. The Raman laser was pumped by a passively ${Q}$-switched Tm:YAP laser emitting at 1935 nm. Due to the bi-axial properties of the KGW crystal, the laser exhibits stimulated Raman emission at two separate spectral lines: 2272 nm and 2343 nm. The output energies achieved at these two

Ultraviolet photoacoustic microscopy (UV-PAM) has recently been demonstrated as a potential imaging tool for surgical margin analysis (SMA). UV-PAM does not require staining or micrometer-thick slicing, which is inevitable in conventional histological imaging. To promote UV-PAM as a practical intraoperative diagnostic tool, the imaging speed should be improved while preserving the high-resolution imaging

Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) is a computational approach geared towards creating high-resolution and large field-of-view images without mechanical scanning. Acquiring color images of histology slides often requires sequential acquisitions with red, green, and blue illuminations. The color reconstructions often suffer from coherent artifacts that are not presented in regular incoherent microscopy

We introduce a new, to the best of our knowledge, type of band-limited optical pulse—soliton-sinc tailored to the nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equation. The idea behind the soliton-sinc pulse is to combine, even if approximately, a property of a fundamental soliton to propagate without distortions in nonlinear systems governed by the NLS equation with a compact band-limited spectrum of a Nyquist pulse

We demonstrate an increase of optical transmittance and saturable absorption of laser-treated free-standing single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) films. The combined acid and low-power non-destructive laser treatment ensures an enhancement of linear transmittance across the visible range and double-digit increase of the saturable absorption of femtosecond laser radiation at 795 nm. The saturable absorption

We show that a soliton in a high-order spatial mode of a multi-mode fiber can completely lose its shot-to-shot coherence due to a noise seed with energy orders of magnitude below that of the soliton. The total degradation of shot-to-shot coherence is caused by a very strong recently demonstrated intermodal nonlinear effect, soliton self-mode conversion. The results indicate that the robustness of solitons

In this Letter, we reported anomalous electro-optic potassium tantalate niobate (KTN) devices, in which both electrons and holes were injected into the KTN crystal via ultraviolet (UV) illumination-assisted charge injection. This could not only significantly enhance the performance of electro-optic devices (e.g., a 270% increase in the deflection angle in terms of the KTN deflector) but also enable

Photoluminescence (PL)-based sensing techniques have been significantly developed in practice due to their key advantages in terms of sensitivity and versatility of the approach. Recently, various nanostructured and hybrid materials have been used to improve the PL quantum yield and the spectral resolution. The near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence excitation has attracted much attention because it offers

Chiral metamaterials in the mid-infrared wavelength range have tremendous potential for studying thermal emission manipulation and molecular vibration sensing. Here, we present one type of chiral plasmonic metasurface absorber with high circular dichroism (CD) in absorption of more than 0.56 across the mid-infrared wavelength range of 5–5.5 µm. The demonstrated chiral metasurface absorbers exhibit

Narrow-band terahertz (THz) Cherenkov radiation can be excited as a relativistic electron bunch passes through the dielectric capillary with sub-millimeter radius. However, due to the diffraction effect, the radiation will enter free space with a large divergence angle, which makes it difficult to collect the radiation energy efficiently. In this Letter, to deal with this challenge, we propose to add

Compared to the multimode interference (MMI) effect, the anti-resonance (AR) effect does not rely on the multimode property of the optical waveguide. This Letter shows that fiber bending can suppress the MMI and can break the superposition of AR spectra of multiple modes in a high-index polymer-coated optical fiber interferometer based on a single-mode fiber—polymer-coated no-core fiber—single-mode

A photonic scanning receiver with optical frequency scanning and electrical intermediate frequency envelope detection is proposed to implement wide-range microwave frequency measurement. This system applies photonic in-phase and quadrature frequency mixing to distinguish and measure the signals in two frequency bands that mirror each other. Combined with the photonic frequency octupling technique,

Accessing the point-spread function (PSF) of a complex optical system is important for a variety of imaging applications. However, placing an invasive point source is often impractical, and estimating it blindly with multiple frames is slow and requires a complex nonlinear optimization. Here, we introduce a simple single-shot method to noninvasively recover the accurate PSF of an isoplanatic imaging

Upon excitation with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation, optical windows ${{\rm CaF}_2}$ and sapphire emit strong photoluminescence (PL) in the ultraviolet region 200–400 nm. The spectral profiles of the windows observed in the PL spectra appear strongly dependent on their temperature. We suggest the use of PL spectra of ${{\rm CaF}_2}$ and sapphire excited with EUV light to indicate the temperature

This publisher’s note contains a correction to Opt. Lett. 45, 4984 (2020) [CrossRef] .

Equalization based on artificial neural networks (NN) has proved to be an effective way for nonlinearity mitigation in various kinds of optical communication systems. In this Letter, we propose a novel methodology of dual-path neural network (DP-NN)-based equalization. By combining a linear equalizer with an input-pruned NN equalizer, DP-NN can effectively reduce the computation cost compared to a

We report on an akinetic actively-mode-locked wavelength-swept laser (ASL) with a sweep that is highly linear in wavenumber. By tailoring the drive waveform of the intracavity modulator, the wavenumber sweep was further linearized to enable high fidelity frequency-domain interferometric ranging without resampling of the acquired data. Used for catheter-based optical coherence tomography, the ASL showed

A large unexamined second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) process is found in a 4-N,N-dimethylamino-4’-N’-methyl stilbazolium tosylate (DAST) crystal, which has a large figure of merit among NLO crystals. In second-order NLO processes using a DAST crystal, the ${\chi}_{111}^{(2)}$ process of light excitation is commonly used, involving a-axis polarized light excitation with light generation of a-axis

Pancharatnam–Berry phase optical elements (PBOEs) have received much attention due to their ability to generate complex structured light or to manipulate the shape of a light beam. This work demonstrates a tunable liquid crystal (LC) Pancharatnam–Berry (LCPB) lens using a simple and cost-effective PB phase hologram optical setup and thermal polymerization to form an irreversible photo-patterning alignment

A new technique, to the best of our knowledge, for the characterization of the effective refractive index modulation in optical fibers due to transverse acoustic mode resonances excited by electrostriction is reported. The resonances excited by an optical pulse are probed by a narrow bandwidth long-period grating (LPG) inscribed in the fiber, which is interrogated by a continuous wave (CW) beam. The

We demonstrate an elastic multi-wavelength selective switch with up to two wavelength switching capability per crosspoint. We fabricated the switch in a silicon photonics foundry and demonstrated a 17 nm tuning range for ring resonators, with a mean path loss of 2.43 dB. This is a 70% reduction in path loss as compared to previous generations, and we demonstrate a high-speed pulse-amplitude-modulation-4

In this Letter, we present and experimentally validate the first direct hyperspectral dual-comb gas imaging system operating in the mid-infrared region. This method provides an unmatched combination of super-fine spectral characterization and high temporal resolution without the need for thermal contrast between the target molecules and the background. In a proof-of-concept experiment, the system has

This publisher’s note contains corrections to Opt. Lett. 45, 3633 (2020) [CrossRef] .

We develop a fluoride-based intra-cavity pumped Ho laser for the first time, where the severe thermal lensing of the intra-cavity pumping mechanism can be compensated by the negative thermal-optical property of the ${\rm{YLi}}{{\rm{F}}_4}$ (YLF) host. A maximum output power of 11.3 W ($\pi$-pol) at 2062 nm, corresponding to a conversion efficiency of 28.2% from the incident diode laser to the Ho laser

Coupling of two dielectric wires with a rectangular cross section gives rise to bonding and anti-bonding resonances. The latter is featured by extremal narrowing of the resonant width for variation of the aspect ratio of the cross section and distance between wires. A plane wave resonant to this anti-bonding resonance gives rise to unprecedent enhancement of the optical forces up to several nano Newtons

We propose and investigate theoretically the Kerr squeezing of light at a wavelength of 2 µm in chalcogenide fibers with large nonlinearity and—this is the advance—with much reduced attenuation. We present suitably realistic but straightforward designs of low-loss step-index single-mode fibers with the nonlinear Kerr coefficient 3 to 4 orders of magnitude higher than for standard telecommunication

We address topological currents in polariton condensates excited by uniform resonant pumps in finite honeycomb arrays of microcavity pillars with a hole in the center. Such currents arise under combined action of the spin–orbit coupling and Zeeman splitting, which breaks the time-reversal symmetry and opens a topological gap in the spectrum of the structure. The most representative feature of this

We propose and demonstrate a modified deep-learning-powered photonic analog-to-digital converter (DL-PADC) in which a neural network is used to eliminate the signal distortions of the photonic system. This work broadens the receiving capability from simple waveforms to complicated waveforms via implementing a modified deep learning algorithm. Thus, the modified DL-PADC can be applied in real scenarios

The spatial modulation principle has been widely studied in indoor optical wireless communication (OWC) systems to provide high-speed connections to users by encoding part of data in the spatial domain. To further increase the speed and to eliminate the requirements of accurate channel state information (CSI) and low channel correlation, in this Letter we propose and demonstrate an indoor OWC system

A compact and broad wavelength range tunable orbital angular momentum (OAM) generator was experimentally demonstrated by cascading two helical photonic crystal fibers (HPCFs) with opposite helicity, i.e., clockwise-twisted $+$ anticlockwise-twisted HPCF. Such an OAM generator exhibited a length of approximately 9 mm and generated a high-quality OAM mode with a wavelength range of 35 nm. Moreover, the

The terahertz band has been recognized as a promising candidate to support future rate-greedy applications such as 6G communications. Optoelectronic terahertz communications are beneficial for the realization of high-speed transmission. In this Letter, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an optoelectronic terahertz transmission system with intensity modulation and direct detection, where a discrete

The neural network (NN) has been widely used as a promising technique in fiber optical communication owing to its powerful learning capabilities. The NN-based equalizer is qualified to mitigate mixed linear and nonlinear impairments, providing better performance than conventional algorithms. Many demonstrations employ a traditional pseudo-random bit sequence (PRBS) as the training and test data. However

We report on the distributed shape measurement of small deformations produced along the length of an optical fiber. The fiber contains multiple waveguiding cores, each inscribed with weak continuous Bragg gratings. The distributed Bragg-reflectivity data for the fiber cores, obtained from the optical backscatter reflectometry, are used to estimate the local curvature and the position of the fiber.

In this Letter, we experimentally demonstrate an unamplified analog RoF distribution of 60 GHz 5G signals. The system entails the heterodyning of two optical tones from an externally injected gain switched laser (EI-GSL) based optical frequency comb to generate a millimeter wave (mmW) signal. A fixed frequency separation and a high level of phase correlation, between the EI-GSL comb lines, results

We simulate and experimentally demonstrate a feedback-based probabilistic constellation shaping (FB-PCS) of a 10 Gbaud 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) signal. Our approach is to adaptively modify the distribution of transmitted symbols based on errors at the receiver, and assumptions about the channel model are not required. Specifically, the error feedback enables solving an optimization

Photon counting lidar signals generally require smoothing to suppress random noise. While the process of reducing the resolution of the profile reduces random errors, it can also create systematic errors due to the smearing of high gradient signals. The balance between random and systematic errors is generally scene dependent and difficult to find, because errors caused by blurring are generally not

Optical encryption has provided a new insight for securing information; however, it is always desirable that high security can be achieved to withstand the attacks. In this Letter, we propose a new method via learning complex scattering media for optical encryption. After the recordings through complex scattering media, a designed learning model is trained. The proposed method uses an optical setup

Reconstructions from computer-generated holograms exhibit spurious duplicate images corresponding to higher diffractive orders, originating from the periodic pixels of a spatial light modulator. We explore the possibility of reducing their visibility by randomization of pixel positions at the stage of displaying of the holograms. Experimental validation is shown on a liquid crystal modulator and also

The strong need in materials and biological science has prompted the development of high-speed quantitative phase imaging. However, for phase retrieval applying digital micromirror devices (DMDs), the accuracy of the retrieved phase will be disturbed by the DMD-induced aberrations. Here, we propose a phase retrieval method based on measuring and correcting errors caused by phase non-uniformity of the

In traditional optical design, a starting point is selected and coefficients optimization is then performed using software. The process requires considerable time and the involvement of a human with design skills and experience. In this Letter, a fast automatic method for freeform imaging systems design is proposed. Using a plane system as the input, a freeform optical system with high image quality