Xinghong Chen, Xingxiang Wang, Guanjie Zhang
et al.
Dynamic manipulation of arbitrary light polarization is of fundamental importance for versatile optical functionalities, yet realizing such full-Poincaré-sphere control within compact nanophotonic architectures remains a formidable challenge. Here, we theoretically propose and numerically demonstrate a magneto-optical skyrmion platform enabling full polarization control of cavity eigenmodes. We reveal the correspondence between the near-field wavefunctions of degenerate dipoles and far-field polarization. By applying multidirectional magnetic fields to magneto-optical photonic crystals, we achieve any complex superposition of orthogonal eigenmodes, thereby realizing arbitrary far-field polarization. This mapping manifests as a skyrmion with a topological charge of 2, guaranteeing coverage of the entire Poincaré sphere. Our theoretical model shows excellent agreement with full-wave simulations. Furthermore, we realize bound states in the continuum (BICs) with dynamically tunable polarization textures and demonstrate high-performance polarization-selective emission and transmission. This work establishes a topological paradigm for precise polarization shaping, offering new avenues for advanced optical communication and sensing.
Artificial neural networks have revolutionized fields from computer vision to natural language processing, yet their growing energy and computational demands threaten future progress. Optical neural networks promise greater speed, bandwidth, and energy efficiency, but suffer from weak optical nonlinearities. Here, we demonstrate a low-power, incoherent-light-driven optical extreme learner that leverages 'data nonlinearity' from optical pattern reverberation, eliminating reliance on intrinsic nonlinear materials. By encoding input data in the spatial polarization distribution of a tailored optical cavity and allowing light to pass through it multiple times, we achieve nonlinear transformations at extremely low optical power. Coupled with a simple trainable readout, our optical learner consistently outperforms linear digital networks in standard image classification tasks and XOR benchmarks, delivering accuracy matching fully nonlinear digital models. Our compact, energy-efficient approach significantly reduces complexity, cost, and energy consumption, paving the way for practical, scalable all-optical machine learning platforms.
Integrated photoacoustic endoscopy and endoscopic ultrasound (PAE/EUS) are recognized as an effective method for detecting intestinal and intravascular diseases. Changes in the morphology and composition of the trachea are significant hallmarks of respiratory diseases. In this study, an acoustic-optic confocal probe was developed and integrated at the tip of a 2.1 mm diameter catheter to perform simultaneous PAE/EUS imaging. Phantom experimental results demonstrated that the catheter achieved a high lateral resolution of 11 µm, with an imaging depth of 12 mm, using an excitation energy of 1.5 μJ. Trachea from healthy and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) rabbit models and in vivo were imaged by the PAE/EUS system. The results demonstrated that photoacoustic imaging could identify increases in the diameter and density of the tracheal microvessels, while ultrasound imaging provided detailed views of the tracheal submucosa. These findings underscore the potential of PAE/EUS in the diagnosis of COPD.
Abstract Arrayed waveguide grating is a versatile and scalable integrated light dispersion device, which has been widely adopted in various applications, including, optical communications and optical sensing. Recently, thin-film lithium niobate emerges as a promising photonic integration platform, due to its ability of shrinking largely the size of typical lithium niobate based optical devices. This would also enable multifunctional photonic integrated chips on a single lithium niobate substrate. However, due to the intrinsic anisotropy of the material, to build an arrayed waveguide grating on X-cut thin-film lithium niobate has never been successful. Here, a universal strategy to design anisotropy-free dispersive components on a uniaxial in-plane anisotropic photonic integration platform is introduced for the first time. This leads to the first implementation of arrayed waveguide gratings on X-cut thin-film lithium niobate with various configurations and high-performances. The best insertion loss of 2.4 dB and crosstalk of −24.1 dB is obtained for the fabricated arrayed waveguide grating devices. Applications of such arrayed waveguide gratings as a wavelength router and in a wavelength-division multiplexed optical transmission system are also demonstrated.
Abstract Exceptional points (EPs), singularities of non-Hermitian systems, often exhibit exotic behaviors by engineering the balance between the system gain and loss. Now, EPs have been demonstrated to enable unidirectional perfect absorption/reflection at the visible light spectrum.
Quantitative phase imaging (QPI) is a label-free computational imaging technique used in various fields, including biology and medical research. Modern QPI systems typically rely on digital processing using iterative algorithms for phase retrieval and image reconstruction. Here, we report a diffractive optical network trained to convert the phase information of input objects positioned behind random diffusers into intensity variations at the output plane, all-optically performing phase recovery and quantitative imaging of phase objects completely hidden by unknown, random phase diffusers. This QPI diffractive network is composed of successive diffractive layers, axially spanning in total ~70 wavelengths; unlike existing digital image reconstruction and phase retrieval methods, it forms an all-optical processor that does not require external power beyond the illumination beam to complete its QPI reconstruction at the speed of light propagation. This all-optical diffractive processor can provide a low-power, high frame rate and compact alternative for quantitative imaging of phase objects through random, unknown diffusers and can operate at different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum for various applications in biomedical imaging and sensing. The presented QPI diffractive designs can be integrated onto the active area of standard CCD/CMOS-based image sensors to convert an existing optical microscope into a diffractive QPI microscope, performing phase recovery and image reconstruction on a chip through light diffraction within passive structured layers.
The letter introduces an extended (3+1)-dimensional [(3+1)D] nonlocal cubic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation describing the dynamics of dissipative light bullets in optical fiber amplifiers under the interplay between dopants and a spatially nonlocal nonlinear response. The model equation includes the effects of fiber dispersion, linear gain, nonlinear loss, fiber nonlinearity, atomic detuning, linear and nonlinear diffractive transverse effects, and nonlocal nonlinear response. A system of coupled ordinary differential equations for the amplitude, temporal, and spatial pulse widths and position of the pulse maximum, unequal wavefront curvatures, chirp parameters, and phase shift is derived using the variational technique. A stability criterion is established, where a domain of dissipative parameters for stable steady-state solutions is found. Direct integration of the proposed nonlocal evolution equation is performed, which allows us to investigate the evolution of the Gaussian beam along a doped nonlocal optical fiber, showing stable self-organized dissipative spatiotemporal light bullets.
Raffaele De Palo, Arianna Elefante, Gabriele Biagi
et al.
A quartz‐enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy sensor architecture capable of detecting eight different air pollutants (CH4, NO2, CO2, N2O, CO, NO, SO2, and NH3) is reported. Each analyte is targeted using the same sensor components (acoustic detection module, quartz‐tuning fork, etc.) and a dedicated laser source. Both interband cascade lasers and quantum cascade lasers are employed to target a well‐resolved and isolated absorption feature from each investigated gas, in a wavelength ranging from 3.35 to 9.06 μm. The sensor is calibrated with certified concentrations of each gas species, in a wet nitrogen matrix. For each analyte, the optimal pressure is determined. Minimum detection limits of 40, 13, 800, 230, 450, 78, 18, and 5.8 ppb are obtained for CH4, NO2, CO2, N2O, CO, NO, SO2, and NH3, respectively, at 100 ms of integration time.
Mahmoud A. Selim, Fan O. Wu, Georgios G. Pyrialakos
et al.
We study the coherence characteristics of light propagating in nonlinear graded-index multimode fibers after attaining optical thermal equilibrium conditions. The role of optical temperature on the spatial mutual coherence function and the associated correlation area is systematically investigated. In this respect, we show that the coherence properties of the field at the output of a multimode nonlinear fiber can be controlled through its optical thermodynamic properties.
Existing light field representations, such as epipolar plane image (EPI) and sub-aperture images, do not consider the structural characteristics across the views, so they usually require additional disparity and spatial structure cues for follow-up tasks. Besides, they have difficulties dealing with occlusions or larger disparity scenes. To this end, this paper proposes a novel Epipolar Focus Spectrum (EFS) representation by rearranging the EPI spectrum. Different from the classical EPI representation where an EPI line corresponds to a specific depth, there is a one-to-one mapping from the EFS line to the view. Accordingly, compared to a sparsely-sampled light field, a densely-sampled one with the same field of view (FoV) leads to a more compact distribution of such linear structures in the double-cone-shaped region with the identical opening angle in its corresponding EFS. Hence the EFS representation is invariant to the scene depth. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we develop a trainable EFS-based pipeline for light field reconstruction, where a dense light field can be reconstructed by compensating the "missing EFS lines" given a sparse light field, yielding promising results with cross-view consistency, especially in the presence of severe occlusion and large disparity. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the validity and superiority of the proposed method over SOTA methods.
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are two novel display technologies that are under updates. The essential feature of AR/VR is the full-color display that requires high pixel densities. To generate three-color pixels, the fluorescent color conversion layer inevitably includes green and red pixels. To fabricate such sort of display kits, inkjet printing is a promising way to position the color conversion layers. In this review article, the progress of AR/VR technologies is first reviewed, and in succession, the state of the art of inkjet printing, as well as two key issues — the optimization of ink and the reduction of coffee-ring effects, are introduced. Finally, some potential problems associated with the color converting layer are highlighted.
Inspired by the mechanism of visual attentional selection, a color feature selection unit consisting of photoreceptors and an attentional selection circuit (ASC) is presented. The detection and wavelength recognition of trichromatic light are accomplished by the photoreceptors with RGB filters. The ASC, fabricated in a standard CMOS technology, activates the competition among photoreceptors to select the principal color-component feature defined as the attentional focus. The number of focuses and resolution can be changed with a top-down stimulus. Electrical test results show that the ASC can select and interpret the most important color-component feature. In optical tests, the ASC chip-based unit can extract the principal color-component of single-color and dual-color light in real-time to complete color recognition. The percentage ratio between the intensity of stray light relative to the light with maximum intensity is up to 93.58%. And the maximum achievable recognition frame rate is 1 kHz, which is more than one order of magnitude higher than the frequency of the biological vision systems. Besides, the unit's outputs can be transformed into binary codes as labels for color recognition, and the color recognition process does not require the participation of ADC, CPU, and memory, consequently avoiding the von Neumann bottleneck.
Topography is the study of an area on the earth's surface. This term relates to the land's slope or contour, which is the interval of elevation differences between two adjacent and parallel contour lines. Topography generally presents a three-dimensional model of object surface relief and an identification of land or hilly areas based on horizontal coordinates such as latitude and longitude, and vertical position, namely elevation. The topography is essential information that must be provided in the execution of building or road construction based on the ground contour. The problem which is the ground contour which can provide visualization topography as a three-dimensional (3D) condition of the ground contour is not normal (non-linear). Another problem is that the traditional measurement techniques with wheel rotation only measure distances and cannot represent the trajectory of the ground contour in 3D. The proposed in-depth evaluation of orientation estimation results in the topography accuracy level. This methodology consists of several processes; Inertia and orientation of an object, Distance measurement, Terrestrial topocentric – Euclidean transformation, and Topography visualization. This research designed a prototype and proposed a new visualization method of the ground contours to reconstruct a topography map between three algorithms; Direct Cosine Matrix-3D Coordinate, Madgwick-3D Coordinate, and Complementary Filter. The methodology was tested and evaluated intensively by direct observation at three measurement locations with different difficulty levels. As a result, the Direct Cosine Matrix-3D Coordinate is able to visualize the ground contours by reconstructing a topography map much better than other methods.
The high-resolution terahertz spectra of the two structural isomers, mannose and galactose, have been measured by terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) in the range of 0.5–4.0 THz at room temperature. Significant differences between these similar molecules have been found in their THz characteristic spectra, implying that THz-TDS is a powerful tool for identifying isomers. Structural analyses and normal mode calculations of the two systems were performed using solid-state density functional theory (DFT) with the PBE and PW91 density functionals as well as using gas-state DFT with B3LYP hybrid functional. Among these calculations, the solid-state simulated results obtained from the PBE method exhibit a good agreement with the experimentally measured spectra. According to the calculated results of PBE, the observed spectral features were assigned as primarily external lattice translations, deformations, and rotations with lesser contributions due to intramolecular motion of pyranose ring, CH2OH group, and hydroxyl groups.
Given the extensive use of antibiotics at present, the identification of antibiotics and production quality monitoring are of high importance. However, conventional antibiotic identification methods have a low sensitivity and a long detection time. Here, we propose an identification method that combines terahertz (THz) spectroscopy and chemometric technology. THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) was performed for sixteen types of antibiotics, including β-lactam, cephalosporins, macrolides, and tetracyclines. The absorption spectra within the frequency range of 0.2–1.5 THz were calculated. For dimensionality reduction, principal component analysis (PCA) and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) were implemented, respectively. The data after dimensionality reduction were input into a support vector machine (SVM). The model parameters were optimized through grid search (GS), genetic algorithm (GA), and particle swarm optimization (PSO) methods, and the optimal identification results were obtained after comparison across these methods. Experiments indicate a differentiation of the THz absorption spectra among the sixteen types of antibiotics. After dimensionality reduction, the training time of the model significantly decreased. The use of the t-SNE-PSO-SVM model achieved the highest average accuracy on the prediction set, which was 99.91%. Thus, our study does not only confirm that the t-SNE-PSO-SVM model proves to be a reliable method for antibiotics identification, but also confirms that the combination of THz-TDS and chemometric pattern recognition has great potential for drug detection.
In this paper, we investigate non-markovian dynamics of a system of two interacting qubits. With the help of stochastic calculus we derive the non-Markovian non-linear stochastic Schrödinger equation. This equation is solved by the direct computer simulation. The simulation is used to obtain some dynamic properties of the system.
Emranul Haque, Subaha Mahmuda, Md. Anwar Hossain
et al.
A highly sensitive surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor on a dual-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) for low refractive index (RI) detection is presented in this paper. Plasmonic material silver (Ag) is deposited outside of the fiber structure to detect changes of the surrounding medium's refractive index. To prevent oxidation a thin layer of titanium dioxide (TiO<sub>2</sub>) is employed on top of the silver. The sensor shows maximum wavelength sensitivity and amplitude sensitivity of 116,000 nm/RIU and 2452 RIU<sup>−1</sup> with corresponding resolutions (R) of 8.62 × 10<sup>−7</sup> and 5.55 × 10<sup>−6</sup> RIU, respectively. A thorough study of the relevant literature yielded that these attained sensitivities in both interrogation methods are the highest among reported PCF-SPR sensors to date. In addition, the sensor possesses a very high figure of merit of 2320 in the sensing range of 1.29 to 1.39. Therefore, it would be a suitable candidate for pharmaceutical inspection, organic chemical sensing, and biosensing and other analytes detection.
Conformal transformation optics provides a simple scheme for manipulating light rays with inhomogeneous isotropic dielectrics. However, there is usually discontinuity for refractive index profile at branch cuts of different virtual Riemann sheets, hence compromising the functionalities. To deal with that, we present a special method for conformal transformation optics based on the concept of geodesic lens. The requirement is a continuous refractive index profile of dielectrics, which shows almost perfect performance of designed devices. We demonstrate such a proposal by achieving conformal transparency and reflection. We can further achieve conformal invisible cloaks by two techniques with perfect electromagnetic conductors. The geodesic concept may also find applications in other waves that obey the Helmholtz equation in two dimensions.