Response characteristic analysis of polarization maintaining fiber ring resonator with dual-coupler for sensing application

A polarization maintaining fiber ring resonator with dual-coupler (PMDC-FRR) for sensing application is presented in this paper. Polarization maintaining directional fiber couplers and fiber loop are employed to eliminate the polarization fading in the fiber ring resonator. Three important characteristic parameters associated with the sensing application, which are the visibility of the output intensities, the free spectral range and the finesse, are discussed as functions of the coupler coefficients and the fiber loop length in detail. In addition, the critical drive voltage of the tunable laser to keep the output intensities stable is also analyzed, when the fiber ring resonator with dual-coupler is utilized as fiber sensor with phase modulation. A PMDC-FRR is designed practically in experiment with the power coupling coefficients of 0.5 and the loop length of 22 m. The experimental results provide sufficient arguments for the theoretical predicts. The theoretical and experimental analysis results will be useful to the sensing application of the PMDC-FRR.     

Space defragmentation for packing problems

One of main difficulties of multi-dimensional packing problems is the fragmentation of free space into several unusable small parts after a few items are packed. This study proposes a defragmentation technique to combine the fragmented space into a continuous usable space, which potentially allows the packing of additional items. We illustrate the effectiveness of this technique using the two- and three-dimensional bin packing problem, where the aim is to load all given items (represented by rectangular boxes) into the minimum number of identical bins. Experimental results based on well-known 2D and 3D bin packing data sets show that our defragmentation technique alone is able to produce solutions approaching the quality of considerably more complex meta-heuristic approaches for the problem. In conjunction with a bin shuffling strategy for incremental improvement, our resultant algorithm outperforms all leading meta-heuristic approaches based on the commonly used benchmark data by a significant margin.     

Blocking Visibility for Points in General Position

For a finite set P in the plane, let b(P) be the smallest possible size of a set Q, Q∩P=∅, such that every segment with both endpoints in P contains at least one point of Q. We raise the problem of estimating b(n), the minimum of b(P) over all n-point sets P with no three points collinear. We review results providing bounds on b(n) and mention some additional observations.