An optical fiber microdisplacement sensor based on symmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) with a seven-core fiber and two single-mode fiber balls is proposed. The rationality and manufacturing process of the MZI sensing structure are analyzed. The fabrication mechanism of the Mach-Zehnder sensor by CO2 laser is described in detail. Experimental results show that temperature sensitivities of the two dips are 98.65pm/℃ and 89.72pm/℃, respectively. The microdisplacement sensitivities are 2017.71 pm/mm and 2457.92 pm/mm, respectively. The simultaneous measurement of temperature and microdisplacement is demonstrated based on the sensitive matrix. The proposed Mach-Zehnder interference sensor exhibits the advantages of compact structure, simple manufacturing process, and high reliability.

Vibration characteristic plays an important role in vibrothermography, which directly affects the heating during the test. In this work, involving all the contacts in the vibrothermography, the “double-mass-three-spring” model is established to explore the vibration characteristic. The obtained results show that ultrasonic gun vibrates at fundamental frequency (FF), while the specimen vibrates at multi-frequencies including FF, 2FF, 3FF, and 4FF, which is validated through experimental investigation results. Additionally, the model proposed in this work reveals a high order harmonics in the vibrothermography test and makes the specimen conduct the steady vibration, which indicates that the model is closer to the practical equipment and can ensure the heating efficiency induced by vibration of specimen to improve the detection capability.

Compressed sensing leverages the sparsity of signals to reduce the amount of measurements required for its reconstruction. The Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor meanwhile is a flexible sensor where its sensitivity and dynamic range can be adjusted based on applications. An investigation is done by using compressed sensing in surface measurements with the Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. The results show that compressed sensing paired with the Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor can reliably measure surfaces accurately. The performance of compressed sensing is compared with those of the iterative modal-based wavefront reconstruction and Fourier demodulation of Shack-Hartmann spot images. Compressed sensing performs comparably to the modal based iterative wavefront reconstruction in both simulation and experiment while performing better than the Fourier demodulation in simulation.

A high sensitive refractive index sensor based on the cladding etched photonic crystal fiber (PCF) Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is proposed, which is spliced a section of photonic crystal fiber between two single modes fibers (SMFs).The interference fringe of the MZI shifts with the variation of the ambient refractive index (RI). It is found that the RI sensitivity slightly decrease with an increase in the interference length. The sensitivities of MZI with 35mm PCF, 40mm PCF, and 45mm PCF are 106.19nm/RIU, 93.33nm/RIU, and 73.64nm/RIU, respectively, in the range of 1.333 to 1.381. After etched, the RI sensitivity of the MZI could be improved obviously. The RI sensitivities of the MZI with 35mm PCF are up to 211.53nm/RIU and 359.37nm/RIU when the cladding diameter decreases to 112μm and 91μm, respectively. Moreover, the sensor is insensitive to temperature, and the measured sensitivity is only 9.21pm/℃ with the range from 20℃ to 500℃. In addition, the sensor has advantage of simple fabrication, low cost, and high RI sensitivity.

A superluminescent diode (SLD) as an alternative of laser is used to detect optical rotation for atomic spin precession. A more uniform Gauss configuration without additional beam shaping and a relatively high power of the SLD have a potential for atomic magnetometers, which is demonstrated in theory and experiments. In addition, the robustness and compactness enable a more practical way for optical rotation detections, especially for applications in magnetoencephalography systems.

Aiming at the drawbacks of low contrast and high noise in the thermal images, a novel method based on the combination of the thermal image sequence reconstruction and the first-order differential processing is proposed in this work, which is comprised of the following procedures. Firstly, the specimen with four fabricated defects with different sizes is detected by using pulsed infrared thermography. Then, a piecewise fitting based method is proposed to reconstruct the thermal image sequence to compress the data and remove the temporal noise of each pixel in the thermal image. Finally, the first-order differential processing based method is proposed to enhance the contrast. An experimental investigation into the specimen containing de-bond defects between the steel and the heat insulation layer is carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method via the above procedures. The obtained results show that the proposed method can remove the noise, enhance the contrast, and even compress the data reaching at 99.1%, thus improving the detectability of pulsed infrared thermography on metal defects.

A numerical analysis on dual core photonic crystal fiber (DC-PCF) based surface plasmon resonance (SPR) refractive index sensor is presented. The guiding parameters and required sensing performances are examined with finite element method (FEM) based software under MATLAB environment. According to simulation, it is warranted that the proposed refractive index sensor offers the maximum amplitude sensitivity of 554.9 refractive index unit (RIU.1) and 636.5RIU.1 with the maximum wavelength sensitivity of 5800nm/RIU and 11500nm/RIU, and the sensor resolutions of 1.72×10.5 RIU and 8.7 × 10.6RIU, at analyte refractive index (RI) of 1.40 for x- and y-polarized modes, respectively. As the sensing performance in different wavelength ranges is quite high, the proposed sensor can be used in simultaneous detection for different wavelength ranges. Therefore, the proposed device is of a suitable platform for detecting biological, chemical, biochemical, and organic chemical analytes.

The pre-treatment of few-mode fibers (FMFs) has been successfully done with CO2 laser. The wavelength difference, Δ. between the two resonant wavelengths in the few-mode fiber Bragg grating (FMFBG) varies with temperature increment during the annealing process. The results show that the treated fibers with lower stresses have lower thermal sensitivity in Δ. than that of non-treated fiber. However, the treated fibers produce FMFBGs with better thermal durability and regeneration ratio. It is conceived that the presence of those stresses in the pristine fiber is responsible for the high thermal sensitivity in Δ.. The thermal relaxation of stresses and structural rearrangement during the thermal annealing process are responsible for the degradation of the strength and resilience of the regenerated grating.

Free-space laser communication is characterized by high communication speed, strong anti-jamming ability, high confidentiality, and flexible configuration. In this paper, a pointing, acquisition, and tracking (PAT) system based on a two-stage (i.e., coarse and fine) composite tracking mechanism is proposed to solve the optical axis alignment problem, which is common in free-space laser communications. The acquisition probability of the PAT system is ensured by designing two tracking modules, a coarse tracking module which combines passive damping with active suppression and a fine tracking module based on an electromagnetic galvanometer. Both modules are combined by using a dynamic scanning mechanism based on the gyroscope signal. Finally, a free-space laser communication test with a long range and a high speed is conducted by two fixed-wing Y12 aircrafts equipped with the proposed PAT system. Experimental results show that the coarse tracking precision of the airborne PAT system is 10μrad (1σ), and the fine tracking precision is 8μrad (1σ) during flights which are much improved as compared with the indoor tests. This indicates that the system can achieve a high precision for PAT during high-speed and long-range laser communications in the free-space. This also verifies the tracking capability and the environmental adaptability of the proposed laser communication PAT system.

Infrared small target detection is a significant and challenging topic for daily security. This paper proposes a novel model to detect LSS-target (low altitude, slow speed, and small target) under the complicated background. Firstly, the fundamental constituents of an infrared image including the complexity and entropy are calculated, which are invoked as adaptive control parameters of smoothness. Secondly, the adaptive L0 gradient minimization smoothing based on texture complexity and information entropy (TCAIE-LGM) is proposed in order to remove noises and suppress low-amplitude details in infrared image abstraction. Finally, difference of Gaussian (DoG) map is incorporated into the pixel-based adaptive segmentation (PBAS) background modeling algorithm, which can differ LSS-target from the sophisticated background. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed novel model has a high detection rate and produces fewer false alarms, which outperforms most state-of-the-art methods.

We propose an in-situ method to calibrate the coil constants of the optical atomic magnetometer. This method is based on measuring the Larmor precession of spin polarized alkali metal atoms and has been demonstrated on a K-Rb hybrid atomic magnetometer. Oscillation fields of different frequencies are swept on the transverse coil. By extracting the resonance frequency through phase-frequency analysis of electron spin projection, the coil constants are calibrated to be 323.1 ± 0.28 nT/mA, 108 ± 0.04 nT/Ma, and 185.8 ± 1.03 nT/mA along the X, Y, and Z directions, respectively.