An optical amplifier is a device that amplifies an optical signal directly, without the need to first convert it to an electrical signal. An optical amplifier may be thought of as a laser without an optical cavity, or one in which feedback from the cavity is suppressed. Optical amplifiers are important in optical communication and laser physics. They are used as optical repeaters in the long distance fiberoptic cables which carry much of the world's telecommunication links.
In fiber optics, polarization-maintaining optical fiber is a single-mode optical fiber in which linearly polarized light, if properly launched into the fiber, maintains a linear polarization during propagation, exiting the fiber in a specific linear polarization state; there is little or no cross-coupling of optical power between the two polarization modes. Such fiber is used in special applications where preserving polarization is essential.
Signal reflection occurs when a signal is transmitted along a transmission medium, such as a copper cable or an optical fiber. Some of the signal power may be reflected back to its origin rather than being carried all the way along the cable to the far end. This happens because imperfections in the cable cause impedance mismatches and non-linear changes in the cable characteristics. These abrupt changes in characteristics cause some of the transmitted signal to be reflected. In radio frequency (RF) practice this is often measured in a dimensionless ratio known as voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) with a VSWR bridge. The ratio of energy bounced back depends on the impedance mismatch. Mathematically, it is defined using the reflection coefficient.
S/PDIF is a type of digital audio interconnect used in consumer audio equipment to output audio over reasonably short distances. The signal is transmitted over either a coaxial cable with RCA connectors or a fibre optic cable with TOSLINK connectors. S/PDIF interconnects components in home theatres and other digital high-fidelity systems.
In optics, dispersion is the phenomenon in which the phase velocity of a wave depends on its frequency.
Mode-locking is a technique in optics by which a laser can be made to produce pulses of light of extremely short duration, on the order of picoseconds (10−12 s) or femtoseconds (10−15 s). A laser operated in this way is sometimes referred to as a femtosecond laser, for example in modern refractive surgery. The basis of the technique is to induce a fixed-phase relationship between the longitudinal modes of the laser's resonant cavity. Constructive interference between these modes can cause the laser light to be produced as a train of pulses. The laser is then said to be 'phase-locked' or 'mode-locked'.
Power-system automation is the act of automatically controlling the power system via instrumentation and control devices. Substation automation refers to using data from Intelligent electronic devices (IED), control and automation capabilities within the substation, and control commands from remote users to control power-system devices.
Dispersion-shifted fiber (DSF) is a type of optical fiber made to optimize both low dispersion and low attenuation.
An optical fiber is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber and find wide usage in fiber-optic communications, where they permit transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths than electrical cables. Fibers are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with less loss; in addition, fibers are immune to electromagnetic interference, a problem from which metal wires suffer excessively. Fibers are also used for illumination and imaging, and are often wrapped in bundles so they may be used to carry light into, or images out of confined spaces, as in the case of a fiberscope. Specially designed fibers are also used for a variety of other applications, some of them being fiber optic sensors and fiber lasers.
Fiber-optic communication is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending pulses of light through an optical fiber. The light forms an electromagnetic carrier wave that is modulated to carry information. Fiber is preferred over electrical cabling when high bandwidth, long distance, or immunity to electromagnetic interference are required.
In optics, a supercontinuum is formed when a collection of nonlinear processes act together upon a pump beam in order to cause severe spectral broadening of the original pump beam, for example using a microstructured optical fiber. The result is a smooth spectral continuum. There is no consensus on how much broadening constitutes a supercontinuum; however researchers have published work claiming as little as 60 nm of broadening as a supercontinuum. There is also no agreement on the spectral flatness required to define the bandwidth of the source, with authors using anything from 5 dB to 40 dB or more. In addition the term supercontinuum itself did not gain widespread acceptance until this century, with many authors using alternative phrases to describe their continua during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
A distributed feedback laser (DFB) is a type of laser diode, quantum cascade laser or optical fiber laser where the active region of the device contains a periodically structured element or diffraction grating. The structure builds a one-dimensional interference grating and the grating provides optical feedback for the laser. This longitudinal diffraction grating has periodic changes in refractive index that cause reflection back into the cavity. The periodic change can be either in the real part of the refractive index, or in the imaginary part. The strongest grating operates in the first order - where the periodicity is one-half wave, and the light is reflected backwards. DFB lasers tend to be much more stable than Fabry-Perot or DBR lasers and are used frequently when clean single mode operation is needed, especially in high speed fiber optic telecommunications. Semiconductor DFB lasers in the lowest loss window of optical fibers at about 1.55um wavelength, amplified by Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), dominate the long distance communication market, while DFB lasers in the lowest dispersion window at 1.3um are used at shorter distances.
A laser beam profiler captures, displays, and records the spatial intensity profile of a laser beam at a particular plane transverse to the beam propagation path. Since there are many types of lasers — ultraviolet, visible, infrared, continuous wave, pulsed, high-power, low-power — there is an assortment of instrumentation for measuring laser beam profiles. No single laser beam profiler can handle every power level, pulse duration, repetition rate, wavelength, and beam size.
Noise-immune cavity-enhanced optical-heterodyne molecular spectroscopy (NICE-OHMS) is an ultra-sensitive laser-based absorption technique that utilizes laser light to assess the concentration or the amount of a species in gas phase by absorption spectrometry (AS).
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write to or erase—CD-ROMs, i.e. it is a type of read-only memory.
In physical optics or wave optics, a vector soliton is a solitary wave with multiple components coupled together that maintains its shape during propagation. Ordinary solitons maintain their shape but have effectively only one (scalar) polarization component, while vector solitons have two distinct polarization components. Among all the types of solitons, optical vector solitons draw the most attention due to their wide range of applications, particularly in generating ultrafast pulses and light control technology. Optical vector solitons can be classified into temporal vector solitons and spatial vector solitons. During the propagation of both temporal solitons and spatial solitons, despite being in a medium with birefringence, the orthogonal polarizations can copropagate as one unit without splitting due to the strong cross-phase modulation and coherent energy exchange between the two polarizations of the vector soliton which may induce intensity differences between these two polarizations. Thus vector solitons are no longer linearly polarized but rather elliptically polarized.
Orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing is a physical layer method for multiplexing signals carried on electromagnetic waves using the orbital angular momentum of the electromagnetic waves to distinguish between the different orthogonal signals.
Optical rogue waves are rare pulses of light analogous to rogue or freak ocean waves. The term optical rogue waves was coined to describe rare pulses of broadband light arising during the process of supercontinuum generation—a noise-sensitive nonlinear process in which extremely broadband radiation is generated from a narrowband input waveform—in nonlinear optical fiber. In this context, optical rogue waves are characterized by an anomalous surplus in energy at particular wavelengths and/or an unexpected peak power. These anomalous events have been shown to follow heavy-tailed statistics, also known as L-shaped statistics, fat-tailed statistics, or extreme-value statistics. These probability distributions are characterized by long tails: large outliers occur rarely, yet much more frequently than expected from Gaussian statistics and intuition. Such distributions also describe the probabilities of freak ocean waves and various phenomena in both the man-made and natural worlds. Despite their infrequency, rare events wield significant influence in many systems. Aside from the statistical similarities, light waves traveling in optical fibers are known to obey the similar mathematics as water waves traveling in the open ocean, supporting the analogy between oceanic rogue waves and their optical counterparts. More generally, research has exposed a number of different analogies between extreme events in optics and hydrodynamic systems. A key practical difference is that most optical experiments can be done with a table-top apparatus, offer a high degree of experimental control, and allow data to be acquired extremely rapidly. Consequently, optical rogue waves are attractive for experimental and theoretical research and have become a highly studied phenomenon. The particulars of the analogy between extreme waves in optics and hydrodynamics may vary depending on the context, but the existence of rare events and extreme statistics in wave-related phenomena are common ground.
An erbium-doped waveguide amplifier is a type of an optical amplifier. It is a close relative of an EDFA, Erbium-doped fiber amplifier, and in fact EDWA's basic operating principles are identical to those of the EDFA. Both of them can be used to amplify infrared light at wavelengths in optical communication bands between 1500 and 1600 nm. However, whereas an EDFA is made using a free-standing fiber, an EDWA is typically produced on a planar substrate, sometimes in ways that are very similar to the methods used in electronic integrated circuit manufacturing. Therefore, the main advantage of EDWAs over EDFAs lies in their potential to be intimately integrated with other optical components on the same planar substrate and thus making EDFAs unnecessary.
