Driven primarily by cloud service and data-center applications, short-reach optical communication has become a key market segment and growing research area in recent years. Short-reach systems are ...characterized by direct detection-based receiver configurations and other low-cost and small form factor components that induce transmission impairments unforeseen in their coherent counterparts. Innovative signaling and digital signal processing (DSP) play a pivotal role in enabling these components to realize their ultimate potentials and meet data rate requirements in cost-effective manners. This paper presents an overview of recent DSP developments for short-reach communications systems and discusses future trends.
The large-range and high-sensitivity strain measurement in high-temperature ambiance is a great challenge in engineering applications. Because of the frangibility of the glass material, the ...traditional optical fiber strain sensors cannot endure a limit strain of 1%. To break through the limit, we propose a hybrid silica/polymer optical fiber sensor. It can endure extraordinarily large strain. The maximum strain of 35% is confirmed by experiments. To achieve high sensitivity and detect a small change in strain, a phase tracking method is used. The sensitivity of the sensor is 28 pm/με which is 28 times larger than that of the traditional FBG sensors. In addition, because of the excellent high-temperature endurance of polyimide (PI) and adhesive, the sensor can survive in the high temperature up to 220 °C. The proposed hybrid silica/polymer optical fiber sensor has potentials to monitor deformation in plastic products, structure health in composite materials, and even strain in biomaterials.
In this paper, the hollow core Bragg fiber (HCBF)-based sensor based on anti-resonant reflecting optical waveguide (ARROW) model is proposed and experimentally demonstrated for simultaneous ...measurement of curvature and temperature by simply sandwiching a segment of HCBF within two single-mode fibers (SMFs). The special construction of a four-bilayer Bragg structure provides a well-defined periodic interference envelope in the transmission spectrum for sensing external perturbations. Owing to different sensitivities of interference dips, the proposed HCBF-based sensor is capable of dual-parameter detection by monitoring the wavelength shift. The highest curvature sensitivity of the proposed sensor is measured to be 74.4 pm/m−1 in the range of 1.1859–2.9047 m−1 with the adjusted R square value of 0.9804. In the meanwhile, the best sensitivity of temperature sensing was detected to be 16.8 pm/°C with the linearity of 0.997 with temperature range varying from 25 to 55 °C. Furthermore, with the aid of the 2 × 2 matrix, the dual demodulation of curvature and temperature can be carried out to realize the simultaneous measurement of these two parameters. Besides dual-parameter sensing based on wavelength shift, the proposed sensor can also measure temperature-insensitive curvature by demodulating the intensity of resonant dips.
Optical fiber sensors are extensively employed for their unique merits, such as small size, being lightweight, and having strong robustness to electronic interference. The above-mentioned sensors ...apply to more applications, especially the detection and monitoring of vital signs in medical or clinical. However, it is inconvenient for daily long-term human vital sign monitoring with conventional monitoring methods under the uncomfortable feelings generated since the skin and devices come into direct contact. This study introduces a non-invasive surveillance system that employs an optical fiber sensor and advanced deep-learning methodologies for precise vital sign readings. This system integrates a monitor based on the MZI (Mach-Zehnder interferometer) with LSTM networks, surpassing conventional approaches and providing potential uses in medical diagnostics. This could be potentially utilized in non-invasive health surveillance, evaluation, and intelligent health care.
In this paper, the field distribution and effective refractive index of transmission modes in single-core six-hole optical fiber were researched by modeling and simulation experiments. Based on the ...simulation results, a new type of sensor for axial strain, curvature, and temperature applications measurement was designed and fabricated. The experimental results showed that the axial strain sensitivities at different dips were -0.97 pm/με and -1.05 pm/με in the range from 0 to 2000 με, and the temperature sensitivities were 35.17 pm/°C and 47.27 pm/°C in the range from 25 to 75 °C. In addition, the proposed sensor also detected the curvature change with sensitivities of 7.36 dB/m
and 20.08 dB/m
from -2.582 m
to -1.826 m
, respectively. Finally, through theoretical analysis, it can be deduced that this has potential application in the field of simultaneous measurement of strain and temperature.
With the widespread use of few-mode fibers, mode characteristics testing becomes essential. In this paper, current few-mode fiber testing techniques are discussed, and the S
imaging technique is ...chosen and demonstrated to be capable of few-mode fiber characterization in principle. As a result, the few-mode fiber characterization system with the S
imaging technique is built and used to obtain accurate mode dispersion of two-mode fibers (a commonly used few-mode fiber) of different lengths. Then, various filters are applied to extract the fundamental and high-order modes to acquire mode coupling components (discrete and distributed mode coupling). The proposed system spectrally characterizes the few-mode fiber by resolving the interference information from the superimposed optical field spatially and has a simple structure and easy operation, which will provide parameter guidance for FMF designing and the FMF sensing experiment optimizing.
Helical twist provides an additional degree of freedom for controlling light in optical waveguides, expanding their applications in sensing. In this paper, we propose a helical ...broken-circular-symmetry core microstructured optical fiber for refractive index sensing. The proposed fiber consists of pure silica and its noncircular helical core is formed by a broken air ring. By using finite element modeling combined with transformation optics, the modal characteristics of the fiber are investigated in detail. The results show that for the core located at the fiber center, the confinement loss of fundamental core modes increases with twist rate, whereas for a sufficiently large core offset the modes can be well confined owing to the twist-induced light guidance mechanism, showing decreases with rising twist rate in the loss spectra. Moreover, we have found that for large twist rates and core offsets, resonant peaks occur at different twist rates due to the couplings between the fundamental core modes and the highly leaky modes created by the helical structure. The refractive index sensing performance is also studied and the obtained results show that the proposed fiber has great potential in fiber sensing.
Cancer is a preeminent threat to the human race, causing millions of deaths each year on the Earth. Traditionally, natural compounds are deemed promising agents for cancer treatment. Cantharidin ...(CTD)-a terpenoid isolated from blister beetles-has been used extensively in traditional Chinese medicines for healing various maladies and cancer. CTD has been proven to be protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) and heat shock transcription factor 1 (HSF-1) inhibitor, which can be potential targets for its anticancer activity. Albeit, it harbors some toxicities, its immense anticancer potential cannot be overlooked, as the cancer-specific delivery of CTD could help to rescue its lethal effects. Furthermore, several derivatives have been designed to weaken its toxicity. In light of extensive research, the antitumor activity of CTD is evident in both in vitro as well as in vivo cancer models. CTD has also proven efficacious in combination with chemotherapy and radiotherapy and it can also target some drug-resistant cancer cells. This mini-review endeavors to interpret and summarize recent information about CTD anticancer potential and underlying molecular mechanisms. The pertinent anticancer strength of CTD could be employed to develop an effective anticarcinogenic drug.
This paper investigates the performance of our recently proposed precoding multiuser (MU) MIMO system in indoor visible light communications (VLC). The transmitted data of decentralized users are ...transmitted by light-emitting-diode (LED) arrays after precoding in a transmitter, by which the MU interference is eliminated. Thus, the complexity of user terminals could be reduced, which results in the reduction of power consumption. The limitation of block diagonalization precoding algorithm in VLC systems is investigated. The corresponding solution by utilizing optical detectors with different fields of view (FOV) is derived, and the impact of FOV to the proposed system is also analyzed. In this paper, we focus on BER and signal-to-noise-ratio performances of the proposed system with the consideration of the mobility of user terminals. Simulation results show that the majority of the indoor region can achieve 100 Mb/s at a BER of 10 -6 when single LED chip's power is larger than 10 mW.
Recently, ultrathin metalenses have attracted dramatically growing interest in optical imaging systems due to the flexible control of light at the nanoscale. In this paper, we propose a ...dual-wavelength achromatic metalens that will generate one or two foci according to the polarization of the incident. Based on geometric phase modulation, two unit cells are attentively selected for efficient operation at distinct wavelengths. By patterning them to two divided sections of the metalens structure plane, the dual-wavelength achromatic focusing effect with the same focal length is realized. In addition, the holographic concept is adopted for polarization-dependent bifocal generation, in which the objective wave is originated from two foci that are respectively formed by two orthogonal polarization states of circularly polarized light, namely Left-handed circularly polarized (LCP) light and Right-handed circularly polarized (RCP) light. The incident light is considered as the reference light. The achromatic focusing and polarization-dependent bifocusing are numerically verified through simulations. The proposed design opens the path for the combination of multi-wavelength imaging and chiral imaging, which may find potential applications, such as achromatic optical devices and polarization-controlled biomedical molecular imaging systems.