Electromagnetics and Photonics Commons^™

Development Of Si-Based Germanium-Tin Infrared Photodiode, Sylvester Amoah

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Short-wave infrared (SWIR) and mid-wave infrared (MWIR) photodetectors have attracted increasing attention for the past few decades. SWIR and MWIR detectors are used for a wide range of applications in military and civilian defense, such as future automotive night vision, video surveillance security cameras, and integrated night vision in mobile/wearable electronics. The current market-dominating IR photodetector technology is mainly developed with the costly III-V or II-V material systems, such as InGaAs, InSb, and HgCdTe. While many efforts have been made towards the hybrid integration of III-Vs or II-VIs on a Si substrate, it is highly desirable to develop an alternative …

Polarization Properties Of Airy And Ince-Gaussian Laser Beams, Sean Michael Nomoto

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The description of polarization states of laser light as linear, circular polarization within the paraxial scalar wave approximation is adequate for most applications. However, this description falls short when considering laser light as an electromagnetic wave satisfying Maxwell's equations. An electric field with a constant unit vector for direction of the field and a space dependent complex scalar amplitude in the paraxial wave approximation does not satisfy Maxwell equations which, in general, requires all three Cartesian components of electric and magnetic fields associated for a nonzero laser beam to be nonzero.

Physical observation of passing a linearly polarized laser through …

Si-Based Germanium Tin Semiconductor Lasers For Optoelectronic Applications, Sattar H. Sweilim Al-Kabi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Silicon-based materials and optoelectronic devices are of great interest as they could be monolithically integrated in the current Si complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) processes. The integration of optoelectronic components on the CMOS platform has long been limited due to the unavailability of Si-based laser sources. A Si-based monolithic laser is highly desirable for full integration of Si photonics chip. In this work, Si-based germanium-tin (GeSn) lasers have been demonstrated as direct bandgap group-IV laser sources. This opens a completely new avenue from the traditional III-V integration approach. In this work, the material and optical properties of GeSn alloys were comprehensively studied. …

External Cavity Mode-Locked Semiconductor Lasers For The Generation Of Ultra-Low Noise Multi-Gigahertz Frequency Combs And Applications In Multi-Heterodyne Detection Of Arbitrary Optical Waveforms, Josue Davila-Rodriguez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The construction and characterization of ultra-low noise semiconductor-based mode-locked lasers as frequency comb sources with multi-gigahertz combline-to-combline spacing is studied in this dissertation. Several different systems were built and characterized. The first of these systems includes a novel mode-locking mechanism based on phase modulation and periodic spectral filtering. This mode-locked laser design uses the same intra-cavity elements for both mode-locking and frequency stabilization to an intra-cavity, 1,000 Finesse, Fabry-Pérot Etalon (FPE). On a separate effort, a mode-locked laser based on a Slab-Coupled Optical Waveguide Amplifier (SCOWA) was built. This system generates a pulse-train with residual timing jitter of

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 …

Ultra High Density Spectral Beam Combining By Thermal Tuning Of Volume Bragg Gratings In Photo-Thermo-Refractive Glass, Derrek Drachenberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

High power lasers with diffraction limited beam quality are desired for many applications in defense and manufacturing. A lot of applications require laser beams at the 100 kW power level along with divergence close to the diffraction limit. The figure of merit for a beam used in such applications should be radiance which determines the laser power delivered to a remote target. One of the primary limiting factors is thermal distortion of a laser beam caused by excessive heat generated in the laser media. Combination of multiple laser beams is usually considered as a method to mitigate these limitations. Spectral …

Design Of Laser Multi-Beam Generator For Plant Discrimination, Sreten Askraba, Arie Paap, Kamal Alameh, John Rowe

Research outputs 2011

Optimisation of the optical signal from the laser multi-spot beam generator employed in a photonic based real-time plant discrimination sensor for use in selective herbicide spraying systems is presented. The plant detection sensor uses a three-wavelength laser diode module that sequentially emits identically-polarized laser light beams through a common aperture, along one optical path. Each laser beam enters a multi-spot beam generator which produces 15 parallel laser beams over a 240mm span. The intensity of the reflected light from each spot is detected by a high-speed line scan image sensor. Plant discrimination is based on calculating the slope of the …

Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Photonic Crystal Lasers And Photonic Devices, Ying Zhou

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation discusses cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) and polymers based photonic devices including one-dimensional (1D) photonic crystal lasers and broadband circular polarizers. CLCs showing unique self-organized chiral structures have been widely used in bistable displays, flexible displays, and reflectors. However, the photonic band gap they exhibit opens a new way for generating laser light at the photonic band edge (PBE) or inside the band gap. When doped with an emissive laser dye, cholesteric liquid crystals provide distributed feedback so that mirrorless lasing is hence possible. Due to the limited surface anchoring, the thickness of gain medium and feedback length is …

Dispersion-Managed Breathing-Mode Semiconductor Mode-Locked Ring Laser, Bojan Resan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A novel dispersion-managed breathing-mode semiconductor mode-locked ring laser is developed. The "breathing-mode" designation derives from the fact that intracavity pulses are alternately stretched and compressed as they circulate around the ring resonator. The pulses are stretched before entering the semiconductor gain medium to minimize the detrimental strong integrating self-phase modulation and to enable efficient pulse amplification. Subsequently compressed pulses facilitate bleaching the semiconductor saturable absorber. The intracavity pulse compression ratio is higher than 50. Down chirping when compared to up chirping allows broader mode-locked spectra and shorter pulse generation owing to temporal and spectral semiconductor gain dynamics. Pulses as short …

Material Evaluation By Pulsed Diode Laser Optoacoustics, Xiaodong Xu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Pulsed diode laser optoacoustic diagnostics were carried out to characterize solid sample materials. The apparatus developed is compact, portable, cost-effective and therefore very promising for both industrial as well as laboratory applications. To our knowledge, this is the first time that optoacoustic characterization and measurement have been performed with a diode laser. The method was successfully applied to measure the thickness of a multilayer structure non-intrusively. Internal cracks of the material were detected by this technique.

A theory for optoacoustic signal generation, propagation and detection is given. A numerical analysis technique is developed to solve for the expected signal. In …