Time domain measurement of the nonlinear refractive index in optical fibers and semiconductor film

A new technique to measure the nonlinear refractive index n2 in optical fibers and semiconductor films has been developed. It is based on the time delay two-beam coupling of very intense picosecond laser pulses that have been self-phase modulated in the nonlinear optical medium. The two beams are coupled in a slow responding medium that is sensitive to time dependent phase distortions. We determine that the amount of phase distortion experienced by the pulse is proportional to the nonlinear refractive index of the medium, This time domain approach can also be applied to optical fiber amplifiers in the presence of gain and to semiconductor films. Because the technique is base on pure refraction the measurement of n2 is insensitive to nonlinear absorption, thermal effects, and surface roughness. With this technique we have measured n2 in 20-m. length of Silica-glass, Ytterbium-doped, and Erbium-doped optical fibers at 1.064-µm. Also we have measured the change of n2 at 1.064-µm in the presence of a 980-nm pump laser in Yb3+ -doped and Er3+ -doped fibers. Finally we have extended the technique to measure n_2 in 2-mm thick samples of GaAs, CdTe and ZnTe semiconductors. In the language of ultrafast spectroscopist, if the best tool to characterize an ultrashort optical pulse is the pulse itself, then the best tool to characterize an optical nonlinear medium is a pulse that has been modified by the medium

The convolution theorem for nonlinear optics

We have expressed the nonlinear optical absorption of a semiconductor in terms of its linear spectrum. We determined that the two-photon absorption coefficient in a strong DC-electric field of a direct gap semiconductor can be expressed as the product of a differential operator times the convolution integral of the linear absorption without a DC-electric field and an Airy function. We have applied this formalism to calculate the two-photon absorption coefficient and nonlinear refraction for GaAs and ZnSe using their linear absorption and have found excellent agreement with available experimental data.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures (6 sub fugures

A compound figure of merit for photonic applications of metal nanocomposites

Selecting nanocomposites for photonic switching applications requires optimizing their thermal, nonlinear and two-photon absorption characteristics. We simplify this step by defining a compound figure of merit (FOM_{C}) for nanocomposites of noble metals in dielectric based on criteria that limit these structures in photonic applications, i.e. thermal heating and two-photon absorption. The device independent results predict extremely large values of FOM_{C} for a specific combination of the metal and insulator dielectric constant given by \epsilon_{h}=\frac{\epsilon_{1}-\epsilon_{2}}{2}, where \epsilon_{h} is the dielectric constant of the host and \epsilon_{1} and \epsilon_{2} are the real and imaginary parts for the metal.Comment: Appearing in Appl. Phys. Lett. (2006

Understanding egocentric human actions with temporal decision forests

Understanding human actions is a fundamental task in computer vision with a wide range of applications including pervasive health-care, robotics and game control. This thesis focuses on the problem of egocentric action recognition from RGB-D data, wherein the world is viewed through the eyes of the actor whose hands describe the actions. The main contributions of this work are its findings regarding egocentric actions as described by hands in two application scenarios and a proposal of a new technique that is based on temporal decision forests. The thesis first introduces a novel framework to recognise fingertip writing in mid-air in the context of human-computer interaction. This framework detects whether the user is writing and tracks the fingertip over time to generate spatio-temporal trajectories that are recognised by using a Hough forest variant that encourages temporal consistency in prediction. A problem with using such forest approach for action recognition is that the learning of temporal dynamics is limited to hand-crafted temporal features and temporal regression, which may break the temporal continuity and lead to inconsistent predictions. To overcome this limitation, the thesis proposes transition forests. Besides any temporal information that is encoded in the feature space, the forest automatically learns the temporal dynamics during training, and it is exploited in inference in an online and efficient manner achieving state-of-the-art results. The last contribution of this thesis is its introduction of the first RGB-D benchmark to allow for the study of egocentric hand-object actions with both hand and object pose annotations. This study conducts an extensive evaluation of different baselines, state-of-the art approaches and temporal decision forest models using colour, depth and hand pose features. Furthermore, it extends the transition forest model to incorporate data from different modalities and demonstrates the benefit of using hand pose features to recognise egocentric human actions. The thesis concludes by discussing and analysing the contributions and proposing a few ideas for future work.Open Acces

A local view on single and coupled molecules

The paper focuses on a novel approach to reveal ultrafast dynamics in single molecules. The main strength of the approach is towards ultrafast processes in extended multi-chromophoric molecular assemblies. Excitonically coupled systems consisting of 2 and 3 rigidly linked perylene-diimide units in a head to tail configuration are studied. Superradiance and inhibited intramolecular decay are observed and discrete jumps in femtosecond response upon break-up of the strong coupling are revealed

Advances in nanophotonics: ultrafast & ultrasensitive

In this tutorial on NanoPhotonics recent advances are highlighted with focus on near field optical methods, ultra-fast probing of single molecules and ultra-sensitive detection of individual non-fluorescent nanoparticles