Mark Harfouche

On-chip integrated differential optical microring refractive index sensing platform based on a laminar flow scheme

We propose an on-chip integrated differential optical microring refractive index sensing platform which leverages laminar flow conditions. Close spacing between a sensing and a reference resonator, and sharing the same microfluidic channel allows the two resonators to experience similar environmental disturbances, such as temperature fluctuations and fluidic-induced transients, achieving reliable and sensitive sensing performance. We obtain a noise floor of 80.0 MHz (0.3 pm) and a bulk refractive index sensitivity of 17.0 THz per refractive index unit (RIU) (64.2 nm/RIU), achieving a limit of detection of 1.4×10(-5) RIU in a 30 min and an 8°C window.

Determining the Quality Factor of Dielectric Ceramic Mixtures with Dielectric Constants in the Microwave Frequency Range

Microwave dielectric ceramic materials are extensively utilized in microwave applications because of their high dielectric constants and quality factors. These applications also require ceramics of zero temperature coefficients at the resonant frequency (τf), which can be realized through mixing a ceramic that one is interested in with another ceramic with −τf, or by performing the ionic substitution. With the mixing/ionic substitution, it is indispensable to compute the quality factors precisely. Previous study indicates that the quality factor depends on the grain size, porosity, internal strain, structure, phase evolution, and conductivity etc. Here we derive a quality factor formula based on the definition, which works very well for multiphase composites, single phase solid solutions, and equivalent ionic substituted single phase materials. Our formula calculation and fits to the previous experimental results demonstrate that the quality factor of the ceramic mixtures strongly depend on the dielectric constants and the dielectric constant variation index. Our results suggest that the impacts from grain size, porosity, and internal strain etc. can be summarized to the dielectric constant or dielectric constant variation index, which is of great importance for future design of high performance microwave dielectric ceramics.

A full-field tomographic imaging camera based on a linearly swept frequency DFB at 1064 nm

High resolution, full-field tomograms are acquired in four exposures of a CCD camera using a swept laser. The imaged depth is selected by modulating the swept laser output power enabling volumetric imaging with no moving parts.

Compressive sensing optical coherence tomography using randomly accessible lasers

We propose and demonstrate a novel a compressive sensing swept source optical coherence tomography (SSOCT) system that enables high speed images to be taken while maintaining the high resolution offered from a large bandwidth sweep. Conventional SSOCT systems sweep the optical frequency of a laser ω(t) to determine the depth of the reflectors at a given lateral location. A scatterer located at delay τ appears as a sinusoid cos (ω(t)τ ) at the photodetector. The finite optical chirp rate and the speed of analog to digital and digital to analog converters limit the acquisition rate of an axial scan. The proposed acquisition modality enables much faster image acquisition rates by interrogating the beat signal at randomly selected optical frequencies while preserving resolution and depth of field. The system utilizes a randomly accessible laser, a modulated grating Y-branch laser, to sample the interference pattern from a scene at randomly selected optical frequencies over an optical bandwidth of 5 THz , corresponding to a resolution of 30 μm in air. The depth profile is then reconstructed using an l1 minimization algorithm with a LASSO constraint. Signal-dependent noise sources, shot noise and phase noise, are analyzed and taken into consideration during the recovery. Redundant dictionaries are used to improve the reconstruction of the depth profile. A compression by a factor of 10 for sparse targets up to a depth of 15 mm in noisy environments is shown.