Dynamics of phason fluctuations in the i-AlPdMn quasicrystal

We report on the study of the dynamics of long wavelength phason fluctuations in the i-AlPdMn icosahedral phase using coherent x-ray scattering. When measured with a coherent x-ray beam, the diffuse intensity due to phasons presents strong fluctuations or speckles pattern. From room temperature to 500 degrees C the speckle pattern is time independent. At 650 degrees C the time correlation of the speckle pattern exhibits an exponential time decay, from which a characteristic time tau is extracted. We find that tau is proportional to the square of the phason wavelength, which demonstrates that phasons are collective diffusive modes in quasicrystals, in agreement with theoretical predictions.     

Atherosclerotic plaque characterization by spatial and temporal speckle pattern analysis

Improved methods are needed to identify the vulnerable coronary plaques responsible for acute myocardial infraction or sudden cardiac death. We describe a method for characterizing the structure and biomechanical properties of atherosclerotic plaques based on speckle pattern fluctuations. Near-field speckle images were acquired from five human aortic specimens ex vivo. The speckle decorrelation time constant varied significantly for vulnerable aortic plaques (tau=40 ms) versus stable plaques (tau=400 ms) and normal aorta (tau=500 ms) . These initial results indicate that different atherosclerotic plaque types may be distinguished by analysis of temporal and spatial speckle pattern fluctuations.     

Instabilities of waves in nonlinear disordered media

We develop a self-consistent theory of temporal fluctuations of a speckle pattern resulting from the multiple scattering of a coherent wave in a weakly nonlinear disordered medium. The speckle pattern is shown to become unstable if the nonlinearity exceeds a threshold value. The instability is due to a feedback provided by the multiple scattering and manifests itself in spontaneous fluctuations of the scattered intensity. The development of instability is independent of the sign of nonlinearity.     

Continual deformation analysis with scanning phase method and time sequence phase method in temporal speckle pattern interferometry

If a laser beam illuminates a continual deformation object surface, it will lead to a temporal speckle pattern on the observation plane. Recording this time-dependent speckle pattern the deformation of the surface of an object can be obtained. Two methods, scanning phase method (SPM) and time sequence phase method (TSPM), have been introduced for measuring the displacement caused by the deformation in temporal speckle pattern interferometry (TSPI). Their principle is that by capturing a series of speckle interference patterns related to the object deformations, the fluctuations in the intensity of the interference patterns can be obtained. Through scanning these fluctuations and estimating both the average intensity and modulation of the temporal speckle interference patterns, the phase maps for whole-field displacements are calculated. In this way one is capable of quantitatively measuring continual displacements simply using a conventional electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) system without phase shifting or a carrier. The elaboration on the new methods is given in this paper and experiments are performed to demonstrate their performance with a conventional ESPI system.     

时间序列散斑干涉技术研究及应用

当用相干激光照射在一个连续位移或变形的漫射物体表面时,在与参考光形成干涉的接收面上即产生一随时间变化的散斑干涉场通过对这一干涉场的时间域进行分析,可实现时变位移场的定量检测本文介绍了基本时间序列散斑干涉场的扫描相位方法和时间序列相位法的相位函数解调原理,探讨了它们的计量特性,并将其用于火箭固体燃料性能的检测.     

Experimental observation of speckle instability in Kerr random media

In a disordered nonlinear medium the transmitted speckle pattern was predicted to become unstable as a result of the positive feedback between intensity fluctuations and local variations of the refractive index. We show experimental evidence of speckle instability for light transversally scattered in a liquid crystal cell, where a two-dimensional controlled disorder is imprinted by suitable illumination of a photoconductive wall and nonlinearity is obtained through optical reorientation of the liquid crystal molecules. The speckle pattern spontaneously oscillates at discrete frequencies above a critical threshold, whose dependence on the scattering mean free path confirms the crucial role of disorder in the feedback process.     

Statistical properties of speckle recorded on film

The statistical properties of speckle recorded on photographic film are studied theoretically and experimentally. When saturation and threshold effects are negligible and the gamma is equal to one, the probability distribution function of spatially integrated film transmittance has the form of a double exponential. Experimental results confirm that under those conditions, the density fluctuations caused by the speckle are independent of the signal.     

Dynamic properties of speckled speckles with relation to velocity measurements of a diffuse object

This paper investigates, experimentally, the dynamic properties of triply-scattered speckled speckles and their application to the velocity measurement of a moving diffuse object, which is behind a transparent diffuse screen. The comparison between triply-scattered speckled speckles and singly-scattered normal speckles shows that the triply-scattered speckle pattern has a high degree of randomness in the spatial domain and that its time-varying intensity fluctuations have a rate 72 times that of the normal speckle case in the temporal domain. Consequently, a velocimeter using the triply-scattered speckles can measure the object velocity with a greatly reduced measuring time than when using normal speckles.     

Low-frequency harmonic vibration analysis with temporal speckle pattern interferometry

In this paper, the time sequence phase method (TSPM) has been applied to measure the displacement caused by low-frequency vibration in temporal speckle pattern interferometry (TSPI). The principle is that by capturing the temporal speckle patterns related to the object vibration, the whole-field displacement responses (amplitude and phase) of the vibrating object can be calculated through scanning these fluctuations. Thus, quantitative measurement can be carried out using a conventional ESPI system without a camera synchronized to the object vibration or a phase shifting system. The elaboration on the method is given and experimental results are presented.     

Speckle interferometric technique to assess soap films

An speckle interferometric technique to monitor the thinning process of vertical soap film before the film rupture is presented. The interferometric arrangement consists in a double aperture pupil optical system which images an input diffuser. In a first step, a reference specklegram is stored in the computer buffer memory. Afterwards, the soap film is located in front of one pupil aperture, an uniform displacement of the diffuser is produced and a new speckle pattern is stored. The soap film status is characterized in terms of the changes that this dynamic phase object introduces in the correlation fringes obtained by applying a FFT algorithm to the resulting summed specklegram. This procedure is done in real time as far as the soap film evolves in the successive status. It is experimentally demonstrated that the soap film during drawing acts as a variable wedge. The correlation fringes behavior becomes an important tool to establish the wedge shaped soap film angle and the thickness variations.     

SrTiO3 displacive transition revisited via coherent X-ray diffraction

We present a coherent x-ray diffraction study of the antiferrodistortive displacive transition of SrTiO3, a prototypical example of a phase transition for which the critical fluctuations exhibit two length scales and two time scales. From the microbeam x-ray coherent diffraction patterns, we show that the broad (short-length scale) and the narrow (long-length scale) components can be spatially disentangled, due to 100-microm-scale spatial variations of the latter. Moreover, both components exhibit a speckle pattern, which is static on a approximately 10 mn time scale. This gives evidence that the narrow component corresponds to static ordered domains. We interpret the speckles in the broad component as due to a very slow dynamical process, corresponding to the well-known central peak seen in inelastic neutron scattering.     

Effect of speckle pattern on laser Doppler velocimeters

The effect of speckle pattern on laser Doppler velocimeters is studied theoretically and experimentally. We have found that dynamic speckle patterns can cause error in velocity measurement. Increasing sampling time and using proper signal processing circuits can eliminate this bad effect caused by speckle pattern.The accuracy of velocity measurement is better than 2.1％ in a wide velocity range(4.66-468.86 mm/s)when speckle effects are taken into account.     

纵向运动双散射散斑场的动态特性研究

研究了慢纵向运动双散射散斑场的统计性质,得出纵向运动双散射散斑振幅自相关函数、强度涨落自相关函数,并由此得出,夫朗和费衍射区内的接收平在上任意点上的自相关函数是时间的非平稳随机过程,而在光轴附近小区域内,强度涨落自相关函数是时间的平稳随机过程,相关时间与散射体纵向运动速度或反比,理论和实验结果相一致。     

Some extreme value statistics of laser speckle patterns

Extreme value statistics of the maximum intensity at a fixed point in the laser speckle pattern are evaluated. The results are employed to set up criteria to determine when the intensity fluctuations exceed the dynamic range of the recording medium.     

Detection of fatigue damage in steel using laser speckle

We investigated a method to detect fatigue damage of steels without contact using laser speckle. In the earlier stage of fatigue in steels, slipbands appear on the surface and microscopic shear strain is stored in the slipbands. The slipbands appear more densely with progress of fatigue damage. When a laser illuminates the surface of the fatigued steel, light intensity distribution of the laser speckle pattern formed by the reflected light changes with the change of surface properties caused by slipbands. It has been clarified that the width of the speckle pattern broadens corresponding to spatial frequency distribution of the surface profile and thus it is presumed that speckle pattern broadens with increase of slipband density. This shows that we can detect fatigue damage by observing the laser speckle pattern on material surface. The method presented in this paper is based on this phenomenon. We observed change of the speckle pattern during fatigue loading under constant stress amplitude using a steel specimen and the relation between speckle pattern, number of loading cycles and also magnitude of loading was considered. We investigated the possibility of detection of fatigue damage using this method and also proposed a method to estimate fatigue life by observing change tendency of the speckle pattern depending on the number of loading cycles in the earlier stage of fatigue before crack initiation.     

Statistics of Gaussian Speckles with Enhanced Fluctuations

Some first-order statistics of speckle fields obeying the complex Gaussian probability density are investigated with the special emphasis on a possibility for the speckle contrast to exceed unity. It is shown that such enhanced fluctuations of speckle fields are generated when the probability density of the complex amplitude is non-circular with the vanishing mean. This means that Gaussian speckles having the contrast of unity are not necessarily fully developed speckles. Some practical situations producing such enhanced fluctuations in speckle fields are discussed.     

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.     

Surface roughness measurement using spatial-average analysis of objective speckle pattern in specular direction

The speckle contrast method (SCM) and the light scattering method (LSM) are two of the most promising optical techniques for on-line surface roughness measurement of slightly-rough surface. However, due to the lack of capability in eliminating the influence from the diffuse component of scattered light, SCM and LSM are both sensitive to the variations of surface correlation length. Additionally, for LSM, the presence of speckle noise leads to fluctuations in the measuring results. To solve these problems, an approach based on the spatial-average analysis of the objective speckle pattern in the specular direction, simply called spatial-average method (SAM), is proposed. The SAM establishes the quantitative relationship between a new characteristic parameter extracted from the recorded speckle image and the rms surface roughness, eliminates to a large extent the influence of diffuse light component on the measuring results, and immunizes itself from the speckle noise. The theoretical foundation of SAM is given in details. A computer simulation is then performed to make comparisons among these three methods. Finally an experiment is presented.     

A novel method to obtain electronic speckle pattern interferometry fringe patterns with high contrast

Traditional speckle fringe patterns of electronic speckle pattern interferometry （ESPI） are obtained by adding, subtracting, or multiplying the speckle patterns recorded before and after the deformation. However, these speckle fringe patterns are of limited visibility, especially for addition and multiplication fringe patterns. We propose a novel method to obtain speckle fringe patterns of ESPI from undeformed and deformed speckle patterns. The fringe pattern generated by our method is of high contrast and has better quality than subtraction fringe. The new method is simple and does not require more computational effort. The proposed method is tested on the experimentally obtained undeformed and deformed speckle patterns. The experimental results illustrate the performance of this approach.     

Specific features of the manifestation of the Doppler effect in diffraction of focused coherent beams in a scattering flow

Intensity fluctuations of a dynamic speckle field formed by diffraction of sharply focused coherent beams in a random flow are studied. Dependences of the form of the spectrum of scattered light intensity fluctuations on the speckle observation angle, flow velocity, and concentration of scatterers are found. The influence of the unscattered component on the formation of the statistically inhomogeneous dynamic speckle field is determined.