New approaches to liquid interfaces through changes in the refractive index and nonlinear susceptibility utilizing ultrashort laser pulses.

Molecules in inhomogeneous liquid environments, such as air/liquid, liquid/liquid, solid/liquid interfaces interact with each other specifically, and sometimes form characteristic structures and emerge unique properties. Here, we introduce two newly developed spectroscopic techniques, the total-internal-reflection ultrafast transient lens method (TIR-UTL) and second harmonic generation-coherent vibrational spectroscopy (SHG-CVS), to investigate the characteristic behaviors of molecules in such inhomogeneous environments. TIR-UTL probes the refractive-index change with sub-picosecond resolution and provides information on ultrafast changes in the population, density, and thermal properties, such as temperature increase and energy transfer from the solute molecules to the surrounding solvent molecules. On the other hand, SHG-CVS probes nonlinear susceptibility changes at the interfacial areas, and is expected to provide spectroscopic information on the low-frequency vibrational modes that reflect the corrective motion of the molecules in such an inhomogeneous environment. These new approaches are based on pump-probe techniques utilizing (ultra) short laser pulses. They are expected to provide further information on inhomogeneous environments from the viewpoints of solute-solvent interactions, changes in the molecular orientation, and the corrective motion of molecules at liquid interfaces.     

A simple and sensitive method for the determination of hydroxylamine in fresh-water samples using hypochlorite followed by gas chromatography.

A new and simple method for the determination of hydroxylamine in environmental water, such as fresh rivers and lakes using hypochlorite, followed by its gas choromatographic detection, has been developed. A glass vial filled with sample water was sealed by a butyl-rubber stopper and aluminum cap without head-space, and then sodium hypochlorite solution was injected into the vial through a syringe to convert hydroxylamine to nitrous oxide. The head-space in the glass vial was prepared with 99.9% grade N2 using a gas-tight syringe. After the glass vial was shaken for a few minutes, nitrous oxide in the gas-phase was measured by a gas chromatograph with an electron-capture detector. The dissolved nitrous oxide in the liquid-phase was calculated according to the solubility formula. The proposed method was applied to the analysis of fresh-water samples taken from Iu river and Hii river, flowing into brackish Lakes Nakaumi and Shinji, respectively.     

Characteristics of thermally expanded core fiber

Thermally expanded core (TEC) fiber is expected to reduce fiber-to-fiber and fiber-to-laser diode connection loss. This paper describes the characteristics of TEC fiber theoretically and experimentally. We reveal theoretically that when fabricating TEC fiber the mode field diameter (MFD) is enlarged more effectively by increasing the heating temperature rather than the heating time. In the 1300-1600°C temperature range with heating times between 0 and 60 min, it is necessary to control the temperature accurately so that no deviation from the target temperature is more than ±30°C. This is in order to ensure that any connection loss caused by MFD mismatch is less than 0.1 dB. We show experimentally that the propagation loss of TEC fiber is dependent on the heating region and wavelength by using a micro burner with a propane/oxygen flame. Based on the relationship between the loss characteristics and the expanded MFD, we suggest a method for nondestructively measuring the MFD in TEC fibers     

A novel dynamic survivable routing in WDM optical networks with/without sparse wavelength conversion

In this paper, we study the dynamic survivable routing problem, both in optical networks without wavelength conversion and in optical networks with sparse wavelength conversion, and propose a novel hybrid algorithm for it based on the combination of mobile agents technique and genetic algorithms (GA). By keeping a suitable number of mobile agents in the network to cooperatively explore the network states and continuously report cycles (that are formed by two disjoint-link routes) into the routing tables, our new hybrid algorithm can promptly determine the first population of cycles for a new request based on the routing table of its source node, without the time consuming process associated with current GA-based lightpath protection schemes. We further improve the performance of our algorithm by introducing a more advanced fitness function that is suitable for both the above networks. Extensive simulation studies on the ns-2 network simulator show that our hybrid algorithm achieves a significantly lower blocking probability than the conventional survivable routing algorithms for all the cases we studied.     

Endoscopic Observation of Tissue by Narrowband Illumination

We propose a new illumination method for a medical endoscope: narrow band imaging (NBI), in which the spectral bandwidth of the filtered light is narrowed. To confirm how the spectral specifications of the filtered light influence a reproduced image, an experiment was conducted observing the endoscopic images of the back mucosa of a human tongue. In addition, the effect of NBI on endoscopic images was investigated through preliminary clinical tests in colonoscopy and upper gastrointestinal endoscopy. It has been shown that NBI can enhance the capillary pattern and the crypt pattern on the mucosa. These patterns are useful features for diagnosing an early cancer.     

Near-infrared photorefractivity in Cr-doped potassium sodium strontium barium niobate single crystal

We report on the photorefractive properties of a Cr-doped (K_1–x Na _x )_2A–2 (Sr _y Ba_1–y )_2–A Nb₁₀O₃₀ (x=0.586, y=0.659, A=1.12) single crystal in the near-infrared spectrum. The sample exhibits photorefractivity for wavelengths up to at least 840 nm where the steady-state two-beam coupling gain is found to be larger than 2 cm^–1. Photorefractive gain and decay rate are measured as a function of wavelength, grating spacing and intensity. The wavelength dependence of gain fluctuations in two-beam coupling are also measured.     

Analysis of Spectral Reflectance Using Normalization Method from Endoscopic Spectroscopy System

Objective assessment of gastrointestinal mucosal color is extremely important in the endoscopic diagnosis of digestive tract disease. In this paper, we propose a method to clarify the spectral characteristics of gastric and colon cancer. A large number of spectral reflectance data of mucous membrane are measured by the endoscopic spectroscopy system (ESS) in the National Cancer Center Hospital East, Kashiwa, Japan and the Department of Internal Medicine, Self-Defense Force Center Hospital, Tokyo, Japan. We assume that early cancer appears primarily in the spectral data of short wavelength, because it is usually present in a superficial cell where short wavelength light is scattered more strongly than long wavelength light. To identify the features in the short wavelength components, the spectral reflectance was divided by the reflectance of a long wavelength. We investigated the possibility of distinguishing early cancer from normal spectral data through statistical analysis, employing the projection axis as the mean difference between them. Early cancer and normal spectral data were projected on the projection axis, and the Student’s T-test was applied to evaluate the mean of the distribution between these data.     

Growth condition of iodine-doped n+-CdTe layers in metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy

Iodine doping of CdTe layers grown on (100) GaAs by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) was studied using diethyltelluride (DETe) and diisopropyltelluride (DiPTe) as tellurium precursors and ethyliodine (EI) as a dopant. Electron densities of doped layers increased gradually with decreasing the growth temperature from 425°C to 325°C. Doped layers grown with DETe had higher electron densities than those grown with DiPTe. When the hot-wall temperature was increased from 200°C to 250°C at the growth temperature of 325°C, doped layers grown with DETe showed an increase of the electron density from 3.7×10¹⁶ cm⁻³ to 2.6×10¹⁸ cm⁻³. On the other hand, such an increase of the electron density was not observed for layers grown with DiPTe. The mechanisms for different doping properties for DETe and DiPTe were studied on the basis of the growth characteristics for these precursors. Higher thermal stability of DETe than that of DiPTe was considered to cause the difference of doping properties. With increasing the hot-wall temperature from 200°C to 250°C, the effective ratio of Cd to Te species on the growth surface became larger for layers grown with DETe than those grown with DiPTe. This was considered to decrease the compensation of doped iodine and to increase the electron density of layers grown with DETe. The effective ratio of Cd to Te species on the growth surface also increased with decreasing growth temperature. This was considered to increase the electron density with decreasing growth temperature.