Effects of overnight military training and acute battle stress on the cognitive performance of soldiers in simulated urban combat.

Understanding the effect of stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation on the ability to maintain an alert and attentive state in an ecologically valid setting is of importance as lapsing attention can, in many safety-critical professions, have devastating consequences. Here we studied the effect of close-quarters battle (CQ battle) exercise combined with overnight military training with sleep deprivation on cognitive performance, namely sustained attention and response inhibition. In addition, the effect of the CQ battle and overnight training on cardiac activity [heart rate and root mean square of the successive differences (RMSSD)] during the cognitive testing and the relationship between cardiac activity and cognitive performance were examined. Cognitive performance was measured with the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) and the sustained attention to response task (SART). Altogether 45 conscripts participated in the study. The conscripts were divided into control (CON) and experimental (EXP) groups. The CON completed the training day after a night of sleep and the EXP after the overnight military training with no sleep. Results showed that the effect of the overnight training on cognitive performance and the between-group difference in heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) depended on the cognitive test. Surprisingly, the cognitive performance was not largely affected by the CQ battle. However, as expected, the CQ battle resulted in a significant decrease in RMSSD and an increase in HR measured during the cognitive testing. Similarly, the HR parameters were related to cognitive performance, but the relationship was found only with the PVT. In conclusion, fatigue due to the overnight training impaired the ability to maintain sufficient alertness level. However, this impairment in arousal upregulation was counteracted by the arousing nature of the SART. Hence, the conscripts' cognitive performance was mainly preserved when performing a stimulating task, despite the fatigue from the sleep loss of the preceding night and physical activity.

Active tapered double-clad fiber with low birefringence.

We addressed the problem of a state of polarization (SOP) drift caused by heating under intense clad pumping in different types of active tapered double-clad fibers. We investigated experimentally the variations of the SOP and degree of polarization (DOP) under clad pumping in polarization-maintaining (PANDA type) and regular (non-PM) Yb-doped double-clad large mode area tapered fibers. We discovered that the birefringence of active fibers is highly dependent on the launched pump power. To solve the problem of the SOP drift in active large mode are fibers, we, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, presented an active double-clad fiber with low intrinsic birefringence as a gain medium. An Yb-doped spun tapered double-clad fiber (sT-DCF) with intrinsic birefringence as low as 1.45×10-8 was manufactured and experimentally studied. We have proved experimentally that the DOP and SOP remains more stable in sT-DCF with increasing pump power compared to PM PANDA-type and regular non-PM tapered double-clad fibers. In particular, the SOP drift in sT-DCF is almost one order of magnitude less than in other tapered fibers, while the DOP drift in sT-DCF is comparable with the drift in PANDA-type fiber and one order of magnitude less than in the non-PM tapered fiber. An active sT-DCF showing efficient amplification was demonstrated in an all-fiber-based picosecond master-oscillator power-amplifier scheme. The system delivered 50 ps pulses at 1040 nm with an average power of 50 W, 34 dB gain, 26 µm MFD and perfect beam quality.

Single-frequency 100†ns / 0.5 mJ laser pulses from all-fiber double clad ytterbium doped tapered fiber amplifier.

High peak power, narrow linewidth sources continue to be in high demand. Fiber amplifiers are a compelling option to scale peak power of long 100-ns-pulses because of their compact size and robustness. Unfortunately, stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) limits peak power of narrow linewidth fiber sources causing instability. We demonstrate SBS suppression for 130-ns pulses from a 5 MHz linewidth seed laser in a fiber amplifier by using tapered fiber with large 50 µm diameter core in the output. The longitudinal change in the core diameter induces frequency shift in the SBS gain peak and the back-travelling Stokes wave is suppressed towards smaller core. We reach 2.2 kW peak power with 18.7 dB polarization extinction ratio and record breaking 4 kW peak power by exciting both polarization states of the polarization maintaining tapered fiber. The output beam quality equals to single mode fibers with M2 = 1.08.

Ultra-large core birefringent Yb-doped tapered double clad fiber for high power amplifiers.

We present a birefringent Yb-doped tapered double-clad fiber with a record core diameter of 96 µm. An impressive gain of over 38 dB was demonstrated for linearly polarized CW and pulsed sources at a wavelength of 1040 nm. For the CW regime the output power was70 W. For a mode-locked fiber laser a pulse energy of 28 µJ with 292 kW peak power was reached at an average output power of 28 W for a 1 MHz repetition rate. The tapered double-clad fiber has a high value of polarization extinction ratio at 30 dB and is capable of delivering the linearly polarized diffraction-limited beam (M2 = 1.09).

Infiltrated bunch of solitons in Bi-doped frequency-shifted feedback fibre laser operated at 1450 nm.

Mode-locked fibre laser as a dissipative system is characterized by rich forms of soliton interaction, which take place via internal energy exchange through noisy background in the presence of dispersion and nonlinearity. The result of soliton interaction was either stationary-localized or chaotically-oscillated soliton complexes, which have been shown before as stand-alone in the cavity. Here we report on a new form of solitons complex observed in Bi-doped mode-locked fibre laser operated at 1450 nm. The solitons are arranged in two different group types contemporizing in the cavity: one pulse group propagates as bound solitons with fixed phase relation and interpulse position eventuated in 30 dB spectrum modulation depth; while the other pulses form a bunch with continuously and chaotically moving solitons. The article describes both experimental and theoretical considerations of this effect.