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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Optical Sensors For Mapping Temperature And Winds In The Thermosphere From A Cubesat Platform, Stephanie Whalen Sullivan May 2013

Optical Sensors For Mapping Temperature And Winds In The Thermosphere From A Cubesat Platform, Stephanie Whalen Sullivan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the same way that mariners desire to know the weather their ships are about to encounter, satellite owners would like to know the conditions along their satellites' orbits. Accurate forecasts would allow operators to secure sensitive components prior to passing through a storm to reduce the risk of damage. Large solar arrays, which can act like sails, can be re-oriented to prevent the satellite from being moved out of its desired orbit. While terrestrial weather forecasters have thousands of sensors with continuous data streams available to generate weather models, very few sensors exist for space weather. Cost of sensing …


Directional Electric Field Sensing Using Slab Coupled Optical Fiber Sensors, Daniel Theodore Perry Feb 2013

Directional Electric Field Sensing Using Slab Coupled Optical Fiber Sensors, Daniel Theodore Perry

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides the details of a multi-axis electric field sensor. The sensing element consists of three slab coupled optical fiber sensors that are combined to allow directional electric field sensing. The packaged three-axis sensor has a small cross-sectional area of 0.5 cm x 0.5 cm achieved by using an x-cut crystal. The method is described that uses a sensitivity-matrix approach to map the measurements to field components. The calibration and testing are described resulting in an average error of 1.5º.This work also includes a description of the packaging method used as well as a thorough analysis of the directional …


Fast-Response Liquid Crystals For Photonic And Display Applications, Jie Sun Jan 2013

Fast-Response Liquid Crystals For Photonic And Display Applications, Jie Sun

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Liquid crystal devices are attractive for many applications such as information displays, spatial light modulators and adaptive optics, because their optical properties are electrically tunable. However, response time of liquid crystal devices is a serious concern for many applications especially for those who require large phase modulation (≥2π). This is because a thick LC layer is usually needed to achieve a large phase shift while the response time of a nematic LC is highly determined by the cell gap.


Optically Isotropic Liquid Crystals For Display And Photonic Applications, Jin Yan Jan 2013

Optically Isotropic Liquid Crystals For Display And Photonic Applications, Jin Yan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For the past few decades, tremendous progress has been made on liquid crystal display (LCD) technologies in terms of stability, resolution, contrast ratio, and viewing angle. The remaining challenge is response time. The state-of-the-art response time of a nematic liquid crystal is a few milliseconds. Faster response time is desirable in order to reduce motion blur and to realize color sequential display using RGB LEDs, which triples the optical efficiency and resolution density. Polymer-stabilized blue phase liquid crystal (PS-BPLC) is a strong candidate for achieving fast response time because its self-assembled cubic structure greatly reduces the coherence length. The response …


Inverse Problems In Multiple Light Scattering, John Broky Jan 2013

Inverse Problems In Multiple Light Scattering, John Broky

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The interaction between coherent waves and material systems with complex optical properties is a complicated, deterministic process. Light that scatters from such media gives rise to random fields with intricate properties. It is common perception that the randomness of these complex fields is undesired and therefore is to be removed, usually through a process of ensemble averaging. However, random fields emerging from light matter interaction contain information about the properties of the medium and a thorough analysis of the scattered light allows solving specific inverse problems. Traditional attempts to solve these kinds of inverse problems tend to rely on statistical …


Metrology Of Volume Chirped Bragg Gratings Recorded In Photo-Thermo-Refractive Glass For Ultrashort Pulse Stretching And Compressing, Christopher Lantigua Jan 2013

Metrology Of Volume Chirped Bragg Gratings Recorded In Photo-Thermo-Refractive Glass For Ultrashort Pulse Stretching And Compressing, Christopher Lantigua

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Chirped Bragg gratings (CBGs) recorded in photo-thermo-refractive (PTR) glass provide a very efficient and robust way to stretch and compress ultra-short laser pulses. These gratings offer the ability to stretch pulses from hundreds of femtoseconds, to the order of 1 ns and then recompress them. However, in order to achieve pulse stretching of this magnitude, 100 mm thick CBGs are needed. Using these CBGs to both stretch, and re-compress the pulse thus requires propagation through 200 mm of optical glass. This therefore demands perfect control of the glass homogeneity, as well as the holographic recording process of the CBG. In …


Mesoscale Light-Matter Interactions, Kyle Douglass Jan 2013

Mesoscale Light-Matter Interactions, Kyle Douglass

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mesoscale optical phenomena occur when light interacts with a number of different types of materials, such as biological and chemical systems and fabricated nanostructures. As a framework, mesoscale optics unifies the interpretations of the interaction of light with complex media when the outcome depends significantly upon the scale of the interaction. Most importantly, it guides the process of designing an optical sensing technique by focusing on the nature and amount of information that can be extracted from a measurement. Different aspects of mesoscale optics are addressed in this dissertation which led to the solution of a number of problems in …


High Capacity Digital Beam Steering Technology, Daniel James Hebert Jan 2013

High Capacity Digital Beam Steering Technology, Daniel James Hebert

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

A novel method is described in detail for steering light in many directions without moving mechanical parts. The method involves a combination of liquid crystal cells and polarizing beam splitters. The polarization at each beam splitter is controlled by applying a signal to its corresponding liquid crystal cell. A study of light steering techniques is described for efficient beam placement, in a line and plane. These techniques permit accurate, non-mechanical, beam steering limited by the response time of the liquid crystal cells. A theoretical limit to the number of discrete directions is described and closely approached for a one dimensional …