Refraction holodiagrams and Snell's law

The refraction holodiagram RHD is analyzed here with respect to the law of refraction. Particularly, we study the surface that exactly conjugates by refraction a virtual point source with a real image or conversely. By using the total optical path as a parameter we build a diagram that consists in a family of Descartes ovals of the apple type that contains the Pascal's limaçon as a particular extreme case and the spherical surface with the Weierstrass points as another. These representations permit the straightforward application of Fermat's principle in the case of arbitrary refracting surfaces and show the shape of generalized Fresnel's zones in the intersections with any surface. Snell's law is applied to rays incident on the apple type surfaces to find out the conditions for exact conjugation. Sensitivity to optical path variations is also discussed. The RHD curves family can be represented in a Cartesian way where the ovals appear as equally spaced straight lines.     

Decomposition of biospeckle images in temporary spectral bands

We present a method of analysis of images of dynamic speckle based on the filtering in frequency bands of the temporary history of each pixel. Butterworth filters are applied to the temporary evolution, and different images are constructed showing the energy in each frequency band. Different degrees of activity of the sample in study, presumably attributed to different origins, are found. The method is exemplified with images of bruising damage in fruits and of biological activity in germinating corn seeds. It is found that the activity in the bruised region of an apple differs from the activity of healthy regions in a certain characteristic frequency range. The activity of the embryo can also be distinguished from that of the endosperm in corn seeds during germination.     

Simulation of dynamic speckle sequences and its application to the analysis of transient processes

Dynamic speckle has been used in recent years to analyse several transient processes that are produced in industrial and biological applications. We present here a numerical simulation to generate a temporal sequence of dynamic speckle patterns which is based on a model used for speckle formation by the superposition of waves from discrete scattering centres. It is demonstrated that the first and second statistics of the intensity of each speckle image, the time history of the speckle pattern, the temporal evolution of the correlation coefficient, and the power spectral density of the intensity generated by the proposed model reproduce quite well those obtained from experimentally recorded data. The process of a fast drying paint is presented as an example of the application of the proposed numerical model.     

Optical image subtraction through speckle modulated by young fringes

A new method for subtracting images is proposed. It is based on assigning complementary Young's fringes to the speckles of the common parts of two images. In this way, carrier frequency is cancelled, and “a-posteriori” spatial filtering shows only noncommon parts. Suggestions on applications of the method are briefly commented.     

Control Strategy of True Time Delay Lines

This article presents the control of adjustable true time delays applied to an optical beamforming system. First is introduced the response of ring resonators of two and four ports and the cascade and lattice structures. The coupling factor and the phase modulation are employed as the control parameters for the adjustable group delay. The strategy of control is proposed and applied to a cascade of five ring resonators for producing wideband true time delays in the picosecond–nanosecond range with 2-GHz bandwidth and extremely low ripple. Ripples lower than 0.1% were obtained for the adjusted group delays. The proposed strategy can be simply extended if more resonators are added to increase the bandwidth of the system.     

The parity function in optical waves propagation

We propose a generalization of the concept of parity as a continuous function and show that it is conserved in optical waves free propagation. Some properties are commented and an experimental implementation to optically generate a representation is suggested.