Huanyu Xu

Measurement of refractive indices and thermal refractive-index coefficients of LiNbO 3 crystal doped with 5 mol. % MgO

The principal refractive indices and the thermal coefficients for a LiNbO(3) crystal doped with 5 mol. % MgO have been measured by a minimum-deviation method for the wavelengths of 0.53975, 0.6328, 1.0795, and 1.3414, microm in the temperature range 20-154.5 degrees C. The constants of modified Sellmeier equations are all given in the described temperature range. The measured results were used to calculate the type I critical phase-matching angles for 1.0795- and 1.3414-microm second-harmonic generation at room temperature and the noncritical phase-matching temperature for 1.0795-microm second-harmonic generation for LiNbO(3) crystal doped with 5 mol. % MgO. The values obtained agree well with the experimental results.

Electrooptical properties of new type fluorinated phenyl-tolane isothiocyanate liquid crystal compounds

ABSTRACT A series of 4ʹ-(4-alkyl-phenyl)-2ʹ,6ʹ-difluorotolane isothiocyanate liquid crystal (LC) compounds were synthesised, and their phase transitions and electrooptical properties were investigated. These compounds exhibit high birefringence, about 0.47–0.52. As the number of carbon atoms in the alkyl chains increases, these LC compounds can exhibit smectic phases. When these LCs were mixed into the commercial LCs, the birefringence values of LC mixtures become higher than pure commercial LCs, and the visco-elastic coefficients of five LC mixtures are very close to each other at every test temperature. The results of response properties indicate that the compounds with a tri-fluorine substitution and n-propyl end group possess better response performance than the others. These LC compounds are particularly attractive for achieving fast response times in LC optic devices. Graphical Abstract

Investigation of optical nonlinearities of azo nickel chelate compound by the Z-scan technique

Abstract With picosecond pulses at a wavelength of 532 nm, we measured the nonlinear transmittance of Ni-azo metal chelate compound film by the Z -scan technique. The nonlinear optical response was determined fluence dependent. The excited singlet state absorption cross-section σ es and the nonlinear refraction cross-section σ r as well as the effective third-order nonlinear refractive index n 2 eff have been obtained.

Performance analysis of an adaptive optics system for free-space optics communication through atmospheric turbulence

The performance of free-space optics communication (FSOC) is greatly degraded by atmospheric turbulence. Adaptive optics (AO) is an effective method for attenuating the influence. In this paper, the influence of the spatial and temporal characteristics of turbulence on the performance of AO in a FSOC system is investigated. Based on the Greenwood frequency (GF) and the ratio of receiver aperture diameter to atmospheric coherent length (D/r0), the relationship between FSOC performance (CE) and AO parameters (corrected Zernike modes number and bandwidth) is derived for the first time. Then, simulations and experiments are conducted to analyze the influence of AO parameters on FSOC performance under different GF and D/r0. The simulation and experimental results show that, for common turbulence conditions, the number of corrected Zernike modes can be fixed at 35 and the bandwidth of the AO system should be larger than the GF. Measurements of the bit error rate (BER) for moderate turbulence conditions (D/r0 = 10, fG = 60 Hz) show that when the bandwidth is two times that of GF, the average BER is decreased by two orders of magnitude compared with fG/f3dB = 1. These results and conclusions can provide important guidance in the design of an AO system for FSOC.

Analysis and reduction of errors caused by Poisson noise for phase diversity technique.

An effective method for reducing the sensitivity of phase diversity (PD) technique to Poisson noise is proposed. The denoising algorithm based on blocking-matching and 3D filtering is first introduced in the wavefront sensing field as a preprocessing stage. Then, the PD technique is applied to the denoised images. Results of the numerical simulations and experiments demonstrate that our approach is better than the traditional PD technique in terms of both the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of phase estimates and the structural similarity index metrics (SSIM). The RMSEs of phase estimates on synthetic data are decreased by approximately 40% across noise levels within the range of 58.7-18.8 dB in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Meanwhile, the overall decline range of SSIM is significantly decreased from 49% to 9%. The experiment and simulation results are in good agreement. The approach may be widely used in various domains, such as the measurements of intrinsic aberrations in optical systems and compensations for atmospheric turbulence.

A high precision phase reconstruction algorithm for multi-laser guide stars adaptive optics*

Adaptive optics (AO) systems are widespread and considered as an essential part of any large aperture telescope for obtaining a high resolution imaging at present. To enlarge the imaging field of view (FOV), multi-laser guide stars (LGSs) are currently being investigated and used for the large aperture optical telescopes. LGS measurement is necessary and pivotal to obtain the cumulative phase distortion along a target in the multi-LGSs AO system. We propose a high precision phase reconstruction algorithm to estimate the phase for a target with an uncertain turbulence profile based on the interpolation. By comparing with the conventional average method, the proposed method reduces the root mean square (RMS) error from 130 nm to 85 nm with a 30% reduction for narrow FOV. We confirm that such phase reconstruction algorithm is validated for both narrow field AO and wide field AO.

High precision system modeling of liquid crystal adaptive optics systems

In this paper, we present a heuristic method to simplify the liquid crystal adaptive optics system (LCAOS) into a single-input-single-output (SISO) system, then build the dynamic model of LCAOS based on subspace identification. Results show that the identified model could accurately describe the dynamical behavior of LCAOS (97% match), with extremely low complexity. The wonderful features of low complexity and high precision, make the identified model highly beneficial for model based controller design, system analysis and dynamical behavior simulation of liquid crystal adaptive optics systems.

Configuration optimization of laser guide stars and wavefront correctors for multi-conjugation adaptive optics*

Multi-conjugation adaptive optics (MCAOs) have been investigated and used in the large aperture optical telescopes for high-resolution imaging with large field of view (FOV). The atmospheric tomographic phase reconstruction and projection of three-dimensional turbulence volume onto wavefront correctors, such as deformable mirrors (DMs) or liquid crystal wavefront correctors (LCWCs), is a very important step in the data processing of an MCAOs controller. In this paper, a method according to the wavefront reconstruction performance of MCAO is presented to evaluate the optimized configuration of multi laser guide stars (LGSs) and the reasonable conjugation heights of LCWCs. Analytical formulations are derived for the different configurations and are used to generate optimized parameters for MCAO. Several examples are given to demonstrate our LGSs configuration optimization method. Compared with traditional methods, our method has minimum wavefront tomographic error, which will be helpful to get higher imaging resolution at large FOV in MCAO.

Open loop liquid crystal adaptive optics systems: progresses and results

Liquid crystal wavefront corrector (LCWFC) is one of the most attractive wavefront correction devices for adaptive optics system. The main disadvantages for conventional nematic LCWFC are polarization dependence and narrow working waveband. In this paper, a polarized beam splitter (PBS) based open loop optical design and an optimized energy splitting method was used to overcome these problems respectively. The results indicate that the open loop configuration was suitable for LCWFC and the novel energy splitting method can significantly improve the detection capability of the liquid crystal adaptive optics system.Liquid crystal wavefront corrector (LCWFC) is one of the most attractive wavefront correction devices for adaptive optics system. The main disadvantages for conventional nematic LCWFC are polarization dependence and narrow working waveband. In this paper, a polarized beam splitter (PBS) based open loop optical design and an optimized energy splitting method was used to overcome these problems respectively. The results indicate that the open loop configuration was suitable for LCWFC and the novel energy splitting method can significantly improve the detection capability of the liquid crystal adaptive optics system.