212,868 research outputs found
High Performances Corrugated Feed Horns for Space Applications at Millimetre Wavelengths
We report on the design, fabrication and testing of a set of high performance
corrugated feed horns at 30 GHz, 70 GHz and 100 GHz, built as advanced
prototypes for the Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) of the ESA Planck mission.
The electromagnetic designs include linear (100 GHz) and dual shaped (30 and 70
GHz) profiles. Fabrication has been achieved by direct machining at 30 GHz, and
by electro-formation at higher frequencies. The measured performances on side
lobes and return loss meet the stringent Planck requirements over the large
(20%) instrument bandwidth. Moreover, the advantage in terms of main lobe shape
and side lobes levels of the dual profiled designs has been demonstrated.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Experimental
Astronom
Narrowband Biphotons: Generation, Manipulation, and Applications
In this chapter, we review recent advances in generating narrowband biphotons
with long coherence time using spontaneous parametric interaction in monolithic
cavity with cluster effect as well as in cold atoms with electromagnetically
induced transparency. Engineering and manipulating the temporal waveforms of
these long biphotons provide efficient means for controlling light-matter
quantum interaction at the single-photon level. We also review recent
experiments using temporally long biphotons and single photons.Comment: to appear as a book chapter in a compilation "Engineering the
Atom-Photon Interaction" published by Springer in 2015, edited by A.
Predojevic and M. W. Mitchel
Multipurpose S-shaped solvable profiles of the refractive index: application to modeling of antireflection layers and quasi-crystals
A class of four-parameter solvable profiles of the electromagnetic admittance
has recently been discovered by applying the newly developed Property & Field
Darboux Transformation method (PROFIDT). These profiles are highly flexible. In
addition, the related electromagnetic-field solutions are exact, in closed-form
and involve only elementary functions. In this paper, we focus on those who are
S-shaped and we provide all the tools needed for easy implementation. These
analytical bricks can be used for high-level modeling of lightwave propagation
in photonic devices presenting a piecewise-sigmoidal refractive-index profile
such as, for example, antireflection layers, rugate filters, chirped filters
and photonic crystals. For small amplitude of the index modulation, these
elementary profiles are very close to a cosine profile. They can therefore be
considered as valuable surrogates for computing the scattering properties of
components like Bragg filters and reflectors as well. In this paper we present
an application for antireflection layers and another for 1D quasicrystals (QC).
The proposed S-shaped profiles can be easily manipulated for exploring the
optical properties of smooth QC, a class of photonic devices that adds to the
classical binary-level QC.Comment: 14 pages, 18 fi
High signal-to-noise ratio observations and the ultimate limits of precision pulsar timing
We demonstrate that the sensitivity of high-precision pulsar timing
experiments will be ultimately limited by the broadband intensity modulation
that is intrinsic to the pulsar's stochastic radio signal. That is, as the peak
flux of the pulsar approaches that of the system equivalent flux density,
neither greater antenna gain nor increased instrumental bandwidth will improve
timing precision. These conclusions proceed from an analysis of the covariance
matrix used to characterise residual pulse profile fluctuations following the
template matching procedure for arrival time estimation. We perform such an
analysis on 25 hours of high-precision timing observations of the closest and
brightest millisecond pulsar, PSR J0437-4715. In these data, the standard
deviation of the post-fit arrival time residuals is approximately four times
greater than that predicted by considering the system equivalent flux density,
mean pulsar flux and the effective width of the pulsed emission. We develop a
technique based on principal component analysis to mitigate the effects of
shape variations on arrival time estimation and demonstrate its validity using
a number of illustrative simulations. When applied to our observations, the
method reduces arrival time residual noise by approximately 20%. We conclude
that, owing primarily to the intrinsic variability of the radio emission from
PSR J0437-4715 at 20 cm, timing precision in this observing band better than 30
- 40 ns in one hour is highly unlikely, regardless of future improvements in
antenna gain or instrumental bandwidth. We describe the intrinsic variability
of the pulsar signal as stochastic wideband impulse modulated self-noise
(SWIMS) and argue that SWIMS will likely limit the timing precision of every
millisecond pulsar currently observed by Pulsar Timing Array projects as larger
and more sensitive antennae are built in the coming decades.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Updated
version: added DOI and changed manuscript to reflect changes in the final
published versio
Millimeter-long Fiber Fabry-Perot cavities
We demonstrate fiber Fabry-Perot (FFP) cavities with concave mirrors that can
be operated at cavity lengths as large as 1.5mm without significant
deterioration of the finesse. This is achieved by using a laser dot machining
technique to shape spherical mirrors with ultralow roughness and employing
single-mode fibers with large mode area for good mode matching to the cavity.
Additionally, in contrast to previous FFPs, these cavities can be used over an
octave-spanning frequency range with adequate coatings. We also show directly
that shape deviations caused by the fiber's index profile lead to a finesse
decrease as observed in earlier attempts to build long FFP cavities, and show a
way to overcome this problem
Engineered optical nonlinearity for a quantum light source
Single-photon pairs created in the nonlinear process of spontaneous
parametric downconversion form the backbone of fundamental and applied
experimental quantum information science. Many applications benefit from
careful spectral shaping of the single-photon wave-packets. In this paper we
tailor the joint spectral wave-function of downconverted photons by modulating
the nonlinearity of a poled crystal without affecting the phase-matching
conditions. We designed a crystal with a Gaussian nonlinearity profile and
confirmed successful wave-packet shaping by two-photon interference
experiments. We numerically show how our method can be applied for attaining
one of the currently most important goals of single-photon quantum optics, the
creation of pure single photons without spectral correlations.Comment: 7 pages (4 pages + appendices), 5 figures. Minor formatting changes.
Fixed typos. Some additional reference
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