Angle extended linear MEMS scanning system for 3D laser vision sensor

Scanning system is often considered as the most important part for 3D laser vision sensor. In this paper, we propose a method for the optical system design of angle extended linear MEMS scanning system, which has features of huge scanning degree, small beam divergence angle and small spot size for 3D laser vision sensor. The principle of design and theoretical formulas are derived strictly. With the help of software ZEMAX, a linear scanning optical system based on MEMS has been designed. Results show that the designed system can extend scanning angle from ±8° to ±26.5° with a divergence angle small than 3.5 mr, and the spot size is reduced for 4.545 times.     

Airborne infrared fire detection optical system with tilted porthole

Thermal infrared imagery techniques have been applied in the field of wild land fire management for many years. A kind of infrared system with a tilted porthole conformal to the ellipsoid prow underside the plane nose is presented. This design increases the range of the inner imaging system, reduces air drag and protects against damage. The paper analyzes the aberration characteristic of a tilted ellipsoid porthole, and brings forward an effective corrective solution to make the system achieve a ? 30° to ? 90° field of regard with an instantaneous ± 4° field of view. The ultimate performance indicates that the infrared optical system has met the detection requirements.     

A wide-FoV athermalized infrared imaging system with a two-element lens

For infrared imaging systems to achieve wide field of view (FoV), wide operating temperature and low weight, this work designs a wide-FoV athermalized infrared imaging system (AIIS) with a two-element lens. Its principle, design, manufacture, measurement and performance validation are successively discussed. The two-element lens contains four surfaces, where three aspheric surfaces are introduced to reduce optical off-axis aberrations and a cubic surface is introduced to achieve athermalization. The key coding mask containing an aspheric surface and a cubic surface is manufactured by nano-metric machining of ion implanted material (NiIM). Experimental results validate that our wide-FoV wavefront coding AIIS has a full FoV of 26.10° and an operating temperature over –20 °C to +70 °C.     

Design and development of an optical beam splitter assembly and high precision colinearity measurements of laser beams

Laser beams with extremely high colinearity are often required where precision position monitoring is important. In order to achieve the said objective, a special type of Laser Beam Splitter Assembly (BSA) has been designed and fabricated in a very small volume due to space constraints. The main features and details of such a system are described here. This type of beam splitter assembly coupled with a diode laser through fibers can be remotely used for alignment or position monitoring of different medium to large size structures with a reconstruction accuracy of 10 μm. In this way, BSA generates two counter propagating laser beams from a single diode laser coupled to an optical fiber. In the present work, the colinearity between two beams within 1 mrad with the variation of 50 μrad has been achieved. The laser's power in the two arms may be controlled precisely, which is an important feature of this BSA. The BSA has been tested to work over a temperature range between ?20 °C to +40 °C. It has also been exposed to 1.0 MeV neutrons at a flux of ～5.0×10¹⁰ n/cm²/s and found compatible.     

Diffraction patterns and nonlinear optical properties of gold nanoparticles

Stable gold nanoparticles have been prepared by using soluble starch as both the reducing and stabilizing agents; this reaction was carried out at 40 °C for 5 h. The obtained gold nanoparticles were characterized by UV–Vis absorption spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and z-scan technique. The size of these nanoparticles was found to be in the range of 12–22 nm as analyzed using transmission electron micrographs. The optical properties of gold nanoparticles have been measured showing the surface plasmon resonance. The second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) properties were investigated by using a continuous-wave (CW) He–Ne laser beam with a wavelength of 632.8 nm at three different incident intensities by means of single beam techniques. The nonlinear refractive indices of gold nanoparticles were obtained from close aperture z-scan in order of 10^?7 cm²/W. Then, they were compared with diffraction patterns observed in far-field. The nonlinear absorption of these nanoparticles was obtained from open aperture z-scan technique. The values of nonlinear absorption coefficient are obtained in order of 10^?1 cm/W.     

Lens Sag Measurement of Microlens Array Using Optical Interferometric Microscope

This study attempted to develop a detection system for lens sag of the microlens array in real time using an optical automatic inspection framework to link with the computer through a camera. An image processing technique was applied to detect the spherical microlens array, and then, the results were compared.The system light source used laser light and applied CCD to collocate with the microscope array to form an automatic optical detection system for an optical interferometric microscope. It applied the principle of the Fizeau interferometer, illuminated the surface of microlens array, and formed the phase difference required by the interference of two lights through the laser light reflected by the reference plane and the surface of the microlens array, thus, forming an interference fringe.When the sag of the microlens was much longer than the wave length of the detection light source, the fringe would be densely distributed, thus, only a few central fringes were clear in the microscopic image. An image processing method was used to search the center of the interference fringe and a creative algorithm was utilized to obtain the lens sag of the microlens. As proved by the experiment, lens sag of 4 microlens arrays were detected in real time, with a minimum detection error of 0.08 μm, and a maximum detection error of 4 μm (error value 1 ~ 9%), according to different sample processes. This system featured a simple structure and is applicable to non-contact detection and detection of different-sized microlens arrays.     

Comparative study on structural and optical properties of ZnO thin films prepared by PLD using ZnO powder target and ceramic target

Zinc oxide thin films have been obtained in O₂ ambient at a pressure of 1.3 Pa by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) using ZnO powder target and ceramic target. The effect of temperature on structural and optical properties of ZnO thin films was investigated systematically by XRD, SEM, FTIR and PL spectra. The results show that the best structural and optical properties can be achieved for ZnO thin film fabricated at 700 °C using powder target and at 400 °C using ceramic target, respectively. The PL spectrum reveals that the efficiency of UV emission of ZnO thin film fabricated by using powder target is low, and the defect emission of ZnO thin film derived from Zn_i and O_i is high.     

Theoretical analysis and test for off-axis Cassegrain optical antenna

By detailed analysis of Cassegrain optical antenna with inclined optical axis, the receiving antenna power and the curve of power attenuation are obtained for different deflection angles. Three-dimensional images which describe the power distribution of the receive laser beam have been obtained. The coupling efficiency of antenna system is obtained from specific experiment. If the deflection angle is less than 0.1519 rad, the coupling efficiency is beyond 80%. In this case, the optical antenna system can be viewed as in alignment approximately. This research will provide a theoretical base and broad application for achieving precise alignment of optical axis in the field of optical communications and three-dimensional laser radar images.     

Influence of the nanoparticle sizes on the photo-induced absorption of La–Ga–S–O–Dy glass nanocomposites

We have established that the illumination by two coherent beams originating from nanosecond Nd:YAG laser at wavelengths 1064 nm and 532 nm in the La–Ga–S–O–Gd:PVA La-Ga-S-O-Dy polymer glass nanocomposites leads to substantial changes in the absorption. The effect is completely reversible and disappears after interruption of the optical treatment. The illumination power density was varied up to 0.6 GW/cm². All the samples show destruction less than 0.2% changes after more than 300,000 laser pulses. The beams were incident with the angles varying between 45° and 50° with respect to the nanocomposite surface. Moreover, the additional analysis of TEM did not demonstrate any additional aggregations. The role of light polarizations, beam stability, and light scattering is discussed.     

Epitaxial ZnO thin films grown by pulsed electron beam deposition

In this work, the pulsed electron beam deposition method (PED) is evaluated by studying the properties of ZnO thin films grown on c-cut sapphire substrates. The film composition, structure and surface morphology were investigated by means of Rutherford backscattering spectrometry, X-ray diffraction and atomic force microscopy. Optical absorption, resistivity and Hall effect measurements were performed in order to obtain the optical and electronic properties of the ZnO films. By a fine tuning of the deposition conditions, smooth, dense, stoichiometric and textured hexagonal ZnO films were epitaxially grown on (0001) sapphire at 700 °C with a 30° rotation of the ZnO basal plane with respect to the sapphire substrate. The average transmittance of the films reaches 90% in the visible range with an optical band gap of 3.28 eV. Electrical characterization reveals a high density of charge carrier of 3.4 × 10¹⁹ cm^?3 along with a mobility of 11.53 cm²/Vs. The electrical and optical properties are discussed and compared to ZnO thin films prepared by the similar and most well-known pulsed laser deposition method.     

A beam shaping design for coupling high power diode laser stack to fiber with capability of spectral narrowing and stabilizing

We applied a VHG-FAC lens in our design in this work to collimate the fast axis and lock the output spectrally. We used a beam shaping technique to improve the beam symmetry and power density of a high power diode laser stack with a stripe mirror plate, a V-Stack mirror and polarization beam combining elements. By this technique, the beam of a high power diode laser stack is effectively coupled into a standard 365 μmcore diameter and a NA = 0.22 fiber. By this technique, compactness, higher efficiency, narrower spectral line width and lower production cost of the diodes are possible.     

Thermographic diagnosis system and imaging algorithm by distributed thermal data using single infrared sensor

An infrared diagnosis device provides two-dimensional images and patient-oriented results that can be easily understood by the inspection target by using infrared cameras. However, this device has disadvantages such as large size, high price, and inconvenient maintenance. In this regard, this study has proposed a small diagnosis device for body heat using a single infrared sensor and implementing an infrared detection system using a single infrared sensor and an algorithm that represents thermography using the obtained data on the temperature of the point source. The developed system had a temperature resolution of 0.1 °C and reproducibility of ±0.1 °C. The accuracy was 90.39% at the error bound of ±0 °C and 99.98% at that of ±0.1 °C. To evaluate the proposed algorithm and system, the infrared images of the camera method were compared. To verify the device’s clinical applicability, thermal images with clinical meaning were obtained from a patient who had lesions.     

Laser microplasma as a tool to fabricate phase grating applied for laser beam splitting

In this paper, we present the method of phase gratings (PGs) formation on the fused silica by laser-induced black body heating (LIBBH) technology with irradiation of ytterbium fiber laser (λ=1.064 µm, τ ~ 4–200 ns, ν ~ 10–100 kHz). Formed PGs have sinusoidal profile with possible depth modulation of 0.5–2 µm. The PGs formation time, depending on its size and the period, ranged between 1 and 5 min. The optical characteristics of the PGs are studied and gained results are compared with the diffraction theory. This result shows that it is possible to fabricate different PGs with necessary optical characteristics by LIBBH technology. The potential application of such optical elements is beam splitting. Thus, the experiment with interference of laser beams has also been carried out in this work. The result of metal film processing by interference pattern is presented in the article.     

Experimental and theoretical studies on bis(glycine) lithium nitrate (BGLiN): A physico-chemical approach

Good quality and bulk size single crystal (size: 20×13×8 mm³) of bis(glycine) lithium nitrate (BGLiN) was grown by a slow evaporation solution technique from the aqueous solutions at constant temperature i.e. 27 °C using synthesized materials. Crystal system and lattice parameters were determined by single crystals as well as powder X-ray diffraction analysis. The lattice parameters of the titled compound are a=10.0223 Å, b=5.0343 Å, c=17.0510 Å, and V=860.312 Å³ and it crystallized in an orthorhombic system with space group Pca2₁ obtained by single crystal XRD. Elemental composition was confirmed by energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopic analysis. Optical absorption spectrum was recorded and various optical parameters such as optical transmission (~60%), and optical band gap (4.998 eV) were calculated. Photoluminescence study shows that the grown crystal is free from major defects. Crystalline perfection of the grown crystal was assessed and found good. Ground state optimized geometry has been obtained by using DFT with 6-31G(d,p) basis set. HOMO and LUMO energy gap was found to be 6.01 eV and dipole moment was 1.65 D.     

Large-range liquid level sensor based on an optical fibre extrinsic Fabry–Perot interferometer

We propose an efficient approach to develop large-range liquid level sensors based on an extrinsic Fabry–Perot optical fibre interferometer with an all fused-silica structure and CO₂ laser heating fusion bonding technology. The sensor exhibits signatures of a high sensitivity of 5.3 nm/kPa (36.6 nm/psi), a resolution of 6.8 Pa (9.9×10⁻⁴ psi) and an extreme low temperature dependence of 0.013 nm/°C. As a result, a high resolution of the water level measurement of approximately 0.7 mm on the length scale of 5 m and small errors of the water pressure measurement induced by the temperature dependence within 0.0025 kPa/°C (0.00036 psi/°C, water level 0.25 mm/°C) are achieved, thus providing useful applications for the detection of the large-range liquid level in harsh environments.     

Multi-spectral antireflection coating on zinc sulphide simultaneously effective in visible,eye safe laser wave length and MWIR region

In recent years multi-spectral device is steadily growing popularity. Multi-spectral antireflection coating effective in visible region for sighting system, laser wavelength for ranging and MWIR region for thermal system can use common objective/receiver optics highly useful for state of art thermal instrumentation. In this paper, design and fabrication of antireflection coating simultaneously effective in visible region (450–650 nm), Eye safe laser wave length (1540 nm) and MWIR region (3.6–4.9 μm) has been reported. Comprehensive search method of design was used and the number of layers in the design was optimised with lowest evaluated merit function studied with respect to various layers. Finally eight-layer design stack was established using hafnium oxide as high index layer and silicon-di-oxide as low index coating material combination. The multilayer stack had been fabricated by using electron beam gun evaporation system in Symphony 9 vacuum coating unit. During layer deposition the substrate was irradiated with End-Hall ion gun. The evaporation was carried out in presence of oxygen and layer thicknesses were measured with crystal monitor. The result achieved for the antireflection coating was 85% average transmission from 450 to 650 nm in visible region, 95% transmission at 1540 nm and 96% average transmission from 3.6 to 4.9 μm in MWIR region.     

Resonator micro optic gyro with double phase modulation technique using an FPGA-based digital processor

Experiments on resonator micro-optic gyro (RMOG) with a digital proportional integral (PI) feedback scheme are performed. In this experimental setup, the key rotation sensing element is a polarization maintaining silica waveguide ring resonator (WRR) with a ring length of 7.9 cm and a diameter of 2.5 cm. A good linearity of 0.0015% over a wide range of ± 2 × 10⁴ °/s can be achieved for the RMOG theoretically. The optimal digital PI feedback scheme is adopted in the frequency servo loop to reduce the reciprocal frequency fluctuations due to the WRR resonance frequency and laser frequency drifts. Residual equivalent input fluctuation can be reduced as low as 0.03 °/s/√Hz based on the optimal digital PI feedback scheme, which is close to the shot noise limited spectral density 0.02 °/s/√Hz of the RMOG with the input optical power of 0.2 mW. Relationship between RMOG output signal and angular rate is obtained from ± 0.1 °/s to ± 5 °/s. The standard deviation of the residuals between RMOG output results and linear fit curve is 0.066 °/s. For an integration of the processing circuit, all the processing circuit is implemented by a field programmable gate array (FPGA) instead of instruments. The output of this digitalized RMOG is obtained over a range of ± 550 °/s. The linearity of this digitalized RMOG is 0.0169%.     

High temperature operation of edge-emitting photonic-crystal distributed-feedback quantum cascade lasers at λ∼7.6 μm

We present large-area, edge-emitting, photonic-crystal (PC) distributed-feedback (DFB) quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) emitting at λ∼7.6 μm and operating up to a heat sink temperature of 80 °C. The lasers use the anticrossing of index- and Bragg-guided dispersions of rectangular lattice to control the optical mode in the wafer plane. Single-mode operation with a high signal-to-noise ratio of about 20 dB and narrow beam divergence of 6.2° was obtained. A high peak power of 630 mW at 20 °C and still more than 160 mW at 60 °C was observed. Such a high performance single-mode device is very important to expand the potential applications in the long-wave infrared range.     

Optical properties of PMN–PT thin films prepared using pulsed laser deposition

(1 ? x)Pb(Mg_1/3Nb_2/3)O₃–xPbTiO₃ (PMN–PT) thin films have been deposited on quartz substrates using pulsed laser deposition (PLD). Crystalline microstructure of the deposited PMN–PT thin films has been investigated with X-ray diffraction (XRD). Optical transmission spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy are used to characterize optical properties of the deposited PMN–PT thin films. The results show that the PMN–PT thin films of perovskite structure have been formed, and the crystalline and optical properties of the PMN–PT thin films can be improved as increasing the annealing temperature to 750 °C, but further increasing the annealing temperature to 950 °C may lead to a degradation of the crystallinity and the optical properties of the PMN–PT thin films. In addition, a weak second harmonic intensity (SHG) has been observed for the PMN–PT thin film formed at the optimum annealing temperature of 750 °C according to Maker fringe method. All these suggest that the annealing temperature has significant effect on the structural and optical properties of the PMN–PT thin films.     

Synthesis of Ag-deionized water nanofluids using multi-beam laser ablation in liquids

Multi-pulse laser ablation of silver in deionized water was studied. The laser beams were arranged in a cross-beam configuration. In our experiments, two single-mode, Q-switched Nd-Yag lasers operating at 1064 nm, pulse duration of 5.5 ns and 10 Hz rep rate were used. The laser fluence of the second beam was 0.265 J/cm² for all tests. Two levels of the laser fluences were used for the ablating beam: 0.09 and 0.265 J/cm² (11,014 and 33,042 J/cm² at the focal point, respectively). The silver target was at 50 mm from the cell window and 10 mm deep. The second beam was aligned parallelly with the silver target and focused at 2 mm in front of the focal point of the ablating beam. For all cases, the delay time between the ablating beam and the cross-beam was 40 μs. In general, the ablated particles were almost all spherical. For fluence of 0.09 J/cm ² and single-beam approach, the mean particle size was about 29 nm. The majority of the particles, however, were in 19–35 nm range and there were some big ones as large as 50–60 nm in size. For double-beam approach, the particles were smaller with the average size of about 18 nm and the majority of the particles were in 9–21 nm range with few big one as large as 40 nm. For the beam fluence of 0.265 J/cm² and single-beam configuration, the particle sizes were smaller, the mean particles size was about 18 nm and the majority of the particles were in the range of 10–22 nm with some big one as large as 40 nm. For double-beam approach, the mean particle size was larger (24.2 nm) and the majority of the particle were distributed from 14 to 35 nm with some big particles can be found with sizes as big as 70 nm. Preliminary measurements of the thermal conductivity and viscosity of the produced samples showed that the thermal conductivity increased about 3–5% and the viscosity increased 3.7% above the base fluid viscosity even with the particle volume concentration as low as 0.01%.