Long-term monitoring and analysis of Brood X cicada activity by distributed fiber optic sensing technology.

Brood X is the largest of the 15 broods of periodical cicadas, and individuals from this brood emerged across the Eastern United States in spring 2021. Using distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technology, the activity of Brood X cicadas was monitored in their natural environment in Princeton, NJ. Critical information regarding their acoustic signatures and activity level is collected and analyzed using standard outdoor-grade telecommunication fiber cables. We believe these results have the potential to be a quantitative baseline for regional Brood X activity and pave the way for more detailed monitoring of insect populations to combat global insect decline. We also show that it is possible to transform readily available fiber optic networks into environmental sensors with no additional installation costs. To our knowledge, this is the first reported use case of a distributed fiber optic sensing system for entomological sciences and environmental studies.

RF injection locked 18 GHz regeneratively mode-locked semiconductor laser.

In this manuscript, a semiconductor based fiber ring cavity mode-locked laser regeneratively driven at 18 GHz is presented. The optical spectrum of the laser is centered at 1578 nm. The laser is RF injection locked via an external source at 18 GHz. The phase noise of the mode-locked laser is measured and the integrated timing jitter was found to be 10.8 fs (from 100 Hz to 20 MHz) and 13.3 fs (from 100 Hz to Nyquist frequency). The integrated amplitude fluctuation (from 100 Hz to 20 MHz) was less than 0.02%. The laser phase and amplitude noise responses to various injected RF power levels were also investigated. The injection RF power has significant effect on the phase noise and the best jitter value is around 40 dB lower than the cavity regenerated RF power.

1200 nm pumped Tm3+:Lu2O3 ceramic lasers.

We report on an experimental demonstration of a 1200-nm pumped Tm3+:Lu2O3 ceramic laser. By using a gain-switched, tunable Cr4+:forsterite laser, the excitation spectrum was measured, with optimum pumping bands centered near 1198 nm, 1204 nm, and 1211 nm. The highest slope efficiency of 21.5% was obtained at the pump wavelength of 1204 nm. Comparative energy efficiency measurements performed near 1200-nm and 800-nm pumping further showed that nearly 40% improvement was obtained in slope efficiency measured with respect to the incident pump energy for 1200-nm pumping. A transition was further observed from single-wavelength operation at 2066 nm to dual-wavelength operation near 2066 nm and 1967 nm for absorbed pump energies above 50 µJ. In this regime, two consecutive output pulses were observed in the time domain. The shortest temporal duration of the first pulse was 1.1 µs at the incident pulse energy of 105 µJ. The duration and build-up time of the second pulse remained around 5.9 µs and 18.5 µs. We believe that the improved energy efficiency demonstrated for the 1.5% Tm3+:Lu2O3 ceramic with 1200-nm pumping can be used as an alternative scheme for the excitation of Tm3+:Lu2O3 ceramic lasers.

Mirrors with designed spherical aberration for multi-pass cavities.

We present a novel multi-pass cavity design based on the use of a rotationally symmetric end mirror having a specifically designed spherical aberration so that its focal length varies inversely as the ray height from the optical axis. We provide a detailed discussion of how ray tracing can be done for this system and show with numerical simulations that a very rich set of exotic spot patterns can be formed on the end mirrors. We further show a specific q-preserving configuration where the q-parameters of the input and output beams remain the same. Finally, we derive the polar form of the mirror surface profile that gives this offset-dependent focal length.

Femtosecond pulse generation from a Ti3+:sapphire laser near 800 nm with voltage reconfigurable graphene saturable absorbers.

We experimentally show that a voltage-controlled graphene-gold supercapacitor saturable absorber (VCG-gold-SA) can be operated as a fast saturable absorber with adjustable linear absorption at wavelengths as low as 795 nm. This was made possible by the use of a novel supercapacitor architecture, consisting of a high-dielectric electrolyte sandwiched between a graphene and a gold electrode. The high-dielectric electrolyte allowed continuous, reversible adjustment of the Fermi level and, hence, the optical loss of the VCG-gold-SA up to the visible wavelengths at low bias voltages of the order of a few volts (0-2 V). The fast saturable absorber action of the VCG-gold-SA and the bias-dependent reduction of its loss were successfully demonstrated inside a femtosecond Ti3+:sapphire laser operating near 800 nm. Dispersion compensation was employed by using dispersion control mirrors and a prism pair. At a bias voltage of 1.2 V, the laser operated with improved power performance in comparison with that at zero bias, and the VCG-gold-SA initiated the generation of nearly transform-limited pulses as short as 48 fs at a pulse repetition rate of 131.7 MHz near 830 nm. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the shortest wavelength where a VCG-gold-SA has been employed as a mode locker with adjustable loss.

Range resolved lidar for long distance ranging with sub-millimeter resolution.

A lidar technique employing temporally stretched, frequency chirped pulses from a 20 MHz mode locked laser is presented. Sub-millimeter resolution at a target range of 10.1 km (in fiber) is observed. A pulse tagging scheme based on phase modulation is demonstrated for range resolved measurements. A carrier to noise ratio of 30 dB is observed at an unambiguous target distance of 30 meters in fiber.

The effects of filtering RF source phase noise by a low noise, high quality factor actively modelocked laser on the laser's absolute and relative phase noise.

The phase noise of two low noise, high quality factor actively modelocked lasers is investigated. It is found that increasing the quality factor of a laser can increase the phase noise relative to the RF source used to modelock the laser, even though the absolute noise of the laser is decreased. The filtering of phase noise from the modelocking source that causes both the increase in relative noise and the decrease in absolute noise is exploited to reveal phase noise information otherwise obscured in a high quality factor laser.

Two-mode beat phase noise of actively modelocked lasers.

An analytic expression for the phase noise spectrum is estimated when two arbitrary longitudinal modes are selected for beating from the output of an actively mode-locked laser. A separate experiment confirmed the theory qualitatively. It was found that two-mode beating possesses more phase noise than the beating involving the entire mode spectrum, especially at low offset frequency, even though two mode beating noise is decoupled from the RF oscillator noise to the first order.

Jitter reduction by intracavity active phase modulation in a mode-locked semiconductor laser.

We experimentally verify the theory of Haus et al. [IEEE J. Quantum Electron. 40, 41 (2004)] on the effects of timing jitter using intracavity phase modulation on the pulse train of a mode-locked laser. The theory is based on the solution of the Heisenberg-Langevin equation in the presence of dispersion and intracavity phase modulation. Using active intracavity phase modulation, we have reduced the timing jitter on a 10.24 GHz mode-locked diode laser by 50% from 304 to 150 fs integrated from 1 Hz to the Nyquist frequency of 5.12 GHz.

Measurement of the comb dynamics for feedback control of an etalon-based coupled optoelectronic oscillator.

The response of an optical frequency comb from an etalon-based coupled optoelectronic oscillator to changes in drive current, optoelectronic loop phase, modulator bias, and laser cavity length has been measured. It is found that controlling the phase of the optoelectronic loop is best suited for control of the pulse repetition rate, whereas controlling the laser cavity length is best for stabilization of the optical carrier frequency. Moreover, by measuring the instabilities of the carrier frequency at the fixed-point frequency of the optoelectronic phase, changes to the optoelectronic phase can be decoupled from changes to the laser cavity.

Ultralow-jitter and -amplitude-noise semiconductor-based actively mode-locked laser.

We report a semiconductor-based, low-noise, 10.24 GHz actively mode-locked laser with 4.65 fs of relative timing jitter and a 0.0365% amplitude fluctuation (1 Hz to 100 MHz) of the optical pulse train. The keys to obtaining this result were the laser's high optical power and the low phase noise of the rf source used to mode lock the laser. The low phase noise of the rf source not only improves the absolute and relative timing jitter of the laser, but also prevents coupling of the rf source phase noise to the pulse amplitude fluctuations by the mode-locked laser.

Pulse-amplitude equalization by negative impulse modulation for rational harmonic mode locking.

We propose a novel technique based on negative impulse modulation for pulse repetition rate multiplication by rational harmonic mode locking with pulse-amplitude-equalized pulses directly from the laser cavity. We have generated a pulse train of 15 GHz with more than 16 dB suppression of unwanted amplitude modulation spurs by using a 1 GHz RF signal. This is the highest suppression ratio for a repetition rate multiplication factor of 15 to our knowledge.