Differential phase contrast in optical coherence tomography

We report on a modification of optical coherence tomography (OCT) that allows one to measure small phase differences between beams traversing adjacent areas of a specimen. The sample beam of a polarization-sensitive low-coherence interferometer is split by a Wollaston prism into two components that traverse the object along closely spaced paths. After reflection at the various sample surfaces, the beams are recombined at the Wollaston prism. Any phase difference encountered between the two beams is converted into a change of polarization state of the recombined beam. This change is measured, and the resulting signals are converted to differential phase-contrast OCT images. The first images obtained from simple test objects allowed us to determine path-difference gradients with a resolution of the order of 5 x 10(-5) .     

Compulsorily Phase Locked Interferometer Using Orthogonally Polarized Light Source of a Modulated LD with High Extinction Ratio

This paper describes a compulsorily phase locked differential interferometer using an orthogonally polarized light source of a modulated LD with high extinction ratio to reduce non-linearity of the interferometer caused by polarization cross-talk. The current modulated LD is used as a light source to make the interferometer compact and for the scanning phase of the interferometer. The interferometer is operated compulsorily at the maximum inclination point of the fringe intensity curve by fringe scanning and an electric system. A Wollaston prism of high extinction ratio (50 dB) is used to combine the polarizing beams and to make the polarization cross-talk very small. In one light source the polarized output beams are on the same propagation axis; in the other they have a small crossing angle (2.5 mrad ∼ 10 mrad) to completely exclude non-linearity of the interferometer causded by polarization cross-talk. Using jets of a gas mixture of nitrogen and ethylene, this interferometer was demonstrated to be useful in detecting the photothermal effect of a photothermal velocimeter under phase fluctuation in a turbulent flow.     

Microscopy of non-birefringent transmissive phase samples using Sagnac laser interferometer

A cyclic interferometer, appropriately combined with a long working distance microscope objective, is adapted for quantitative phase microscopy. In such an arrangement, the sample information, in terms of the diffracted orders emerging from the sample, is carried by both the counter propagating beams within the cyclic interferometer. However, positioning the sample close to the input/output cube beam splitter and use of a suitably converging laser beam of light as the input to the interferometer ensure that only one of the counter propagating beams carries the object information to the objective while the other beam, which serves as the reference, allows only the undiffracted component to contribute to the process of image formation. Use of suitable polarization optics renders the interferometer its polarization phase shifting property. Using the proposed arrangement, the experimental results showing the quantitative 3D phase rendering of polystyrene microspheres and micro-wells etched in glass are presented.     

Simultaneous generation of helical beams with linear and radial polarization by use of a segmented half-wave plate

Simultaneous generation of helical beams with linear and radial polarization is demonstrated by use of a segmented half-wave plate in a Ti:sapphire laser cavity. A linearly polarized Laguerre-Gaussian beam is converted to a radially polarized beam with a spiral phase shift and vice versa. In addition, these two beams coexist in the cavity, and the cavity emits one of these two beams from an output coupler.     

2600W偏振耦合高效率半导体激光光源

将两个中心波长为808 nm,输出功率为1500W的半导体激光叠阵,经过快慢轴准直后,利用半波片将其中一个叠阵的偏振方向旋转90°,使用偏振分光平板的耦合功能,将两个偏振方向相互垂直的激光耦合到一个光路.扩束后再通过焦距为100 mm的聚焦镜组聚焦,提高激光器的亮度.在工作电流为75 A时,输出功率达到了2600 W,...     

Polarization transforming properties of Dove prisms

We analyze the polarization changes introduced by a rotated Dove prism on the linearly polarized light, using the Jones calculus and the exact ray trace analysis. The state of polarization changes from the linear to a mildly elliptical one when a plane wave front passes through a rotated Dove prism: its semi-major axis is nearly parallel to the input plane of polarization, for any angle of prism rotation. The interferogram contrast remains high for all shearing angles in spite of polarization changes when the Dove prism is incorporated into a rotational shearing interferometer. These results are confirmed experimentally.     

Analysis on the laser beam pointing instability induced fringe shift and contrast dilution from different interferometers used for writing fiber Bragg grating

This paper presents an analysis on the effect of laser beam pointing instability on the fringe shift and hence the contrast dilution of superposed fringes from two beam interferometers. The interferometers analyzed are those commonly used in writing fiber Bragg grating (FBG) such as phase mask, bi-prism and phase mask based Talbot/Holographic type. The beam pointing instability is incorporated as slight change in the angle between two interfering beams. The relative immunity of different interferometers to laser beam pointing is discussed vs location of FBG writing plane from the beam splitter. The effect of the beam pointing was minimum in proximity FBG writing by phase mask. The effect, in terms of fringes contrast dilution, was worst in case of large length interferometers e.g. phase mask based-Talbot interferometer. For intermediate length prism interferometers, the effect was moderate. For a given length interferometer, the fringe shift was directly proportional to beam pointing angle and inversely proportional to fringe separation. Theoretical analysis is verified experimentally by studying the fringe instability of interference pattern formed by a bi-prism of angle 2^o with the copper vapour laser (CVL, λ = 510 nm) beams of different beam pointing instabilities.     

General formulation of spin rotations in neutron interferometry

Starting from the fact, that different rotations can lead to states with the same polarization but different phases the expressions of intensity and polarization of the forward diffracted beam after a Laue-case single crystal neutron interferometer are derived for the general case of phase shifts and spin rotations in both beam paths of the interferometer. A basic and instructive experiment where the polarization of the emerging beam is rotated by phase shift is discussed.     

Coherent Beam Combination of Two Polarization Maintaining Ytterbium Fibre Amplifiers

We investigate coherent beam combination of fibre laser beams by phase locking. Phase noise of a polarization maintaining ytterbium fibre amplifier is inspected with a fibre interferometer. In a feed back control loop, two fibre polarization maintaining ytterbium amplifiers are phase locked and coherent combined when the phase noise is properly controlled by a LiNO3 phase modulator.     

Passively stabilized single-photon interferometer

A single-photon interferometer is a fundamental element in quantum information science. In most previously reported works, single-photon interferometers use an active feedback locking system to stabilize the relative phase between two arms of the interferometer. Here, we use a pair of beam displacers to construct a passively stable single-photon interferometer. The relative phase stabilization between the two arms is achieved by stabilizing the temperature of the beam displacers. A purely polarized single-photon-level pulse is directed into the interferometer input port. By analyzing and measuring the polarization states of the single-photon pulse at the output port, the achieved polarization fidelity of the interferometer is about 99.1 ±0.1%. Our passively stabilized single-photon interferometer provides a key element for generating high-fidelity entanglement between a photon and atomic memory.     

Optical properties of polarization-dependent geometric phase elements with partially polarized light

The behavior of geometric phase elements illuminated with partially polarized monochromatic beams is investigated both theoretically and experimentally. The element discussed in this paper is composed of wave plates with π-retardation and a space-variant orientation angle. We found that a beam emerging from such an element comprises two polarization orders; right-and left-handed circularly polarized states with conjugate geometric phase modification. This phase equals twice the orientation angle of the space-variant wave plate comprising the element. Apart from the two polarization orders, the emerging beam coherence polarization matrix includes a “vectorial interference matrix” which contains information concerning the correlation between the two orthogonal, circularly polarized portions of the incident beam. In this paper we measure this correlation by a simple interference experiment. In addition, we found that the equivalent mutual intensity of the emerging beam is modulated according to the geometric phase induced by the element. Other interesting phenomena concerning propagation will be discussed theoretically and demonstrated experimentally. The experiment made use of a spherical geometric phase element that was realized by use of a space-variant subwavelength grating illuminated with CO₂ laser radiation of 10.6 μm wavelength.     

Physical origin of large positive and negative lateral optical beam shifts in prism-waveguide coupling system

Large lateral beam shift in prism-waveguide coupling system is theoretically analyzed from the viewpoint of interference between multiple reflected beam constituents. It is shown that the reflected beam is a result of interference between two beams: the beam directly reflected from the prism and the total leaky beam coming from guided mode. The thickness of coupling layer determines the amplitude of the total leaky beam, and further determines the sign (positive or negative) of the reflected beam shift. Because of interference between two beams, intrinsic damping itself plays an important role in deciding the distortion of the reflected beam.     

双棱镜改变写入Bragg波长的相位掩模技术

将一种可旋转的双棱镜引入到相位掩模技术中以改变光栅的写入Bragg波长.在该系统中,光纤光栅是由来自可旋转双棱镜所形成的波长为248 nm的紫外干涉条纹写入的,其中,相位掩模被用作 1级衍射光的分束器,通过双棱镜的旋转可改变两写入光束的交叉角.为了初始化Bragg波长的参考值,双光栅的顶角由相位掩模的 1级衍射角和双棱镜的折射率确定.因为在～100 nm范围内两光束的非对称旋转对光栅周期的改变是5×10~(-4) nm,双棱镜引入的光栅的闪耀可忽略.当Bragg波长的移位为1 nm时,棱镜最大的旋转角为～1 degree,最小的旋转角是～2.4 min.与Talbot干涉仪中平面镜的旋转角～23 s/nm相比,该相位干涉仪中棱镜的旋转精度降低了2～3个数量级.     

Cancellation of star light generated by a nearby star–planet system upon detection with a rotationally-shearing interferometer

We derive the analytical expression for the star–planet incidance detected with a (variable angle) rotationally-shearing interferometer, with the absence of star-related quantities. The rotationally-shearing interferometer detects only the tilted wave front incident from a planet. The partial polarization of two rotated beams diminishes the signal amplitude by a factor proportional to the cosine-square of the shearing angle. The polarization considerations favor the small-angle implementation of the rotationally-shearing interferometer.     

Sorting and detecting orbital angular momentum states by using a Dove prism embedded Mach-Zehnder interferometer and amplitude gratings

An experimental system consisting of a Dove prism embedded Mach-Zehnder (M-Z) interferometer and two gratings was built to sort and detect orbital angular momentum (OAM) states of light beams. The helical beams with different OAM states were generated by propagating the fundamental-mode Gaussian beam through a spatial light modulator. The Dove prism embedded M-Z interferometer was used to sort helical beams with odd or even OAM number and two binary amplitude gratings were used to measure the OAM states. Sorting of coaxially-superposed coherent and incoherent helical beams with odd and even OAM states was realized in the experiment.     

Generation of optical vector beams with a diffractive optical element interferometer

We present a novel approach to generating radially and azimuthally polarized vector beams that utilize an interferometer constructed from two identical diffractive optical elements. The measured polarization properties of four vector beam states and their phase relationships are in good agreement with theoretical expectations. This interferometer is passively phase stable and robust, making it suitable for linear and nonlinear optical (superresolution) microscopy.     

A Michelson interferometer using electron waves

An electron interferometer of the Michelson type is realized. Monoenergetic 25 keV electrons emitted from a line source 1000 Å in width are deflected by 90 ° in a magnetic Castaing prism and reflected on two mirrorsM ₁ andM ₂ held at a potential ΔU _m negative with respect to the cathode. In the experiment the mirrors are represented by height differences on the surface of an silvered glass plate. The reflected electrons are once more deflected by the magnetic prism behind which the coherent partial beams 1 and 2 reflected on the mirrorsM ₁ andM ₂, respectively, are superimposed using an electrostatic biprism to form two-beam interferences. The observed fringe shift indicates a phase shift due to differences in height between the equipotentials reflecting the partial beams 1 and 2. It is estimated that path differences less than the electron wavelength of 0.08 Å can be observed.     

New multiplexed system for synchronous measurement of out-of-plane deformation and two orthogonal slopes

We propose a novel system for synchronous measurement of out-of-plane deformation and two orthogonal slopes using a single camera. The linearly polarized reference beam introduced by an optical fiber interferes with the unpolarized object beam to measure the out-of-plane deformation. A modified Mach—Zehnder interferometer is used to measure the two orthogonal slopes of the out-of-plane deformation. One of the object beams of the Mach—Zehnder interferometer is an unpolarized beam, and the other object beam is split into two orthogonal linearly polarized object beams by a polarizing prism. The two beams are orthogonally polarized. Hence, they will not interfere with each other. The two polarized beams respectively interfere with the unpolarized beam to simultaneously measure the two orthogonal slopes of the out-of-plane deformation. In addition, the imaging lens and apertures are respectively placed in three optical paths to independently control the carrier frequencies and shearing amounts. The effectiveness of this method can be proved by measuring two pressure-loaded circular plates.     

Generation of collinearly propagating orthogonally polarized beams

A simple monolithic device for simultaneous generation of collinearly propagating orthogonally polarized light beams of equal intensity is presented. The common cube beam splitter masked by two linear polarizers is used to achieve the purpose. This is experimentally verified through the use of a Stoke's polarimeter. It is also shown experimentally that the same setup behaves as a polarization phase shifting interferometer.     

Switchable vector vortex beam generation using an optical fiber

We present our experimental results on directly transforming a circular-polarized Gaussian beam into linear-polarized vector vortex beams using a two-mode fiber and demonstrate switching between the different 0th-order vector vortex modes excited and guided in the fiber. Depending on the handiness of circular-polarization of the input Gaussian light beam, its launch angle with respect to the fiber axis and by changing them appropriately it is possible to excite and switch between the different vector vortex modes and its coherent linear superposition supported by the two-mode fiber. The output optical beams due to the selectively excited vector modes in the fiber are characterized by using a rotating analyzer and a two-beam interferometer setup to study the polarization and the phase behavior of the vector vortex beam.