Shaoxin Wang

Tunable surface-emitting dual-wavelength laser from a blended gain layer with an external holographic grating feedback structure

A tunable surface-emitting dual-wavelength laser emitted from the blended organic gain layer based on a holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystal (HPDLC) transmission grating feedback structure was reported. The organic blended gain layer was formed from Poly (2-methoxy-5-(2’-ethyl-hexyloxy)-p-phenylenevinylene) (MEH-PPV) and Poly (2-methoxy-5-(3′, 7’-dimethyloctyloxy)-1, 4-phenylenevinylene) (MDMO-PPV) with a weight ratio of 2:1. The dual-wavelength laser located at 629.9 nm and 640 nm was obtained in a single beam. The optical characteristics of these two organic semiconducting materials and the dual-wavelength laser performance under an electric field are investigated and illustrated. This simple tunable dual-wavelength laser shows the potential to extend the development of organic lasers.

Organic Solid-State Tri-Wavelength Lasing from Holographic Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystal and a Distributed Feedback Laser with a Doped Laser Dye and a Semiconducting Polymer Film

Organic solid-state tri-wavelength lasing was demonstrated from dye-doped holographic polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (HPDLC) distributed feedback (DFB) laser with semiconducting polymer poly[-methoxy-5-(2′-ethyl-hexyloxy)-1,4-phenylene-vinylene] (MEH-PPV) and laser dye [4-(dicyanomethylene)-2-methyl-6-(p-dimethylaminostyryl)-4H-pyran] (DCM) by a one-step holography technique, which centered at 605.5 nm, 611.9 nm, and 671.1 nm. The temperature-dependence tuning range for the tri-wavelength dye-doped HPDLC DFB laser was as high as 8 nm. The lasing emission from the 9th order HPDLC DFB laser with MEH-PPV as active medium was also investigated, which showed excellent s-polarization characterization. The diffraction order is 9th and 8th for the dual-wavelength lasing with DCM as the active medium. The results of this work provide a method for constructing the compact and cost-effective all solid-state smart laser systems, which may find application in scientific and applied research where multi-wavelength radiation is required.

Hysteresis compensation of the piezoelectric ceramic actuators–based tip/tilt mirror with a neural network method in adaptive optics

Abstract. The intrinsic hysteresis nonlinearity of the piezo-actuators can severely degrade the positioning accuracy of a tip-tilt mirror (TTM) in an adaptive optics system. This paper focuses on compensating this hysteresis nonlinearity by feed-forward linearization with an inverse hysteresis model. This inverse hysteresis model is based on the classical Presiach model, and the neural network (NN) is used to describe the hysteresis loop. In order to apply it in the real-time adaptive correction, an analytical nonlinear function derived from the NN is introduced to compute the inverse hysteresis model output instead of the time-consuming NN simulation process. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively linearized the TTM behavior with the static hysteresis nonlinearity of TTM reducing from 15.6% to 1.4%. In addition, the tip-tilt tracking experiments using the integrator with and without hysteresis compensation are conducted. The wavefront tip-tilt aberration rejection ability of the TTM control system is significantly improved with the −3  dB error rejection bandwidth increasing from 46 to 62 Hz.

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.

Evaluation of phase state and rotational viscosity of fast response liquid crystals using a fully atomistic molecular dynamics

ABSTRACT Rational design of liquid crystals (LCs) with excellent phase state and rotational viscosity has been a crucial technique for response speed improvement of LC wavefront corrector. A complete process for theoretically evaluating the phase state and rotational viscosity of fast response LCs using a fully atomistic molecular dynamics is reported. Predicted trends in molecular order, phase-transition temperature between metastable states and rotational viscosity show excellent agreement with experimental results. We also demonstrate that overestimation of the attraction both between and within molecules in the general Amber force field mainly leads to a systematic shift in the phase-transition temperature, rotational viscosity and figure-of-merit for fast response LCs. With further optimisations of intermolecular potential, simulation procedure and data processing, this fully atomistic simulation will be a useful evaluation method of response performance of LC materials. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

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.