No Arabic abstract
Pulse coding is an effective method to overcome the trade-off between signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spatial resolution in optical-fiber sensing systems based on optical time-domain reflectometry (OTDR). However, the coding gain has not been yet fully exploited. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental validation of the sampling criteria for correlation-coded OTDR, showing that the coding gain can be further improved by harnessing the oversampling. Moreover, the bandwidth-limited feature of the photodetector can also be utilized to select the sampling rate so that additional SNR enhancement is obtained. We believe this principle could be applied to any practical OTDR-based optical-fiber sensing technology, and serve to update existing systems based on correlation-coded OTDR in a straightforward manner at a relatively low cost.
This paper proposes a novel method to filter out the false alarm of LiDAR system by using the temporal correlation of target reflected photons. Because of the inevitable noise, which is due to background light and dark counts of the detector, the depth imaging of LiDAR system exists a large estimation error. Our method combines the Poisson statistical model with the different distribution feature of signal and noise in the time axis. Due to selecting a proper threshold, our method can effectively filter out the false alarm of system and use the ToFs of detected signal photons to rebuild the depth image of the scene. The experimental results reveal that by our method it can fast distinguish the distance between two close objects, which is confused due to the high background noise, and acquire the accurate depth image of the scene. Our method need not increase the complexity of the system and is useful in power-limited depth imaging.
The capture of scintillation light emitted by liquid Argon and Xenon under molecular excitations by charged particles is still a challenging task. Here we present a first attempt to design a device able to grab sufficiently high luminosity in order to reconstruct the path of ionizing particles. This preliminary study is based on the use of masks to encode the light signal combined with single-photon detectors. In this respect, the proposed system is able to detect tracks over focal distances of about tens of centimeters. From numerical simulations it emerges that it is possible to successfully decode and recognize signals, even complex, with a relatively limited number of acquisition channels. Such innovative technique can be very fruitful in a new generation of detectors devoted to neutrino physics and dark matter search. Indeed the introduction of coded masks combined with SiPM detectors is proposed for a liquid-Argon target in the Near Detector of the DUNE experiment.
The accurate determination and control of the wavelength of light is fundamental to many fields of science. Speckle patterns resulting from the interference of multiple reflections in disordered media are well-known to scramble the information content of light by complex but linear processes. However, these patterns are, in fact, exceptionally rich in information about the illuminating source. We use a fibre-coupled integrating sphere to generate wavelength-dependent speckle patterns, in combination with algorithms based on the transmission matrix method and principal component analysis, to realize a broadband and sensitive wavemeter. We demonstrate sub-femtometre wavelength resolution at a centre wavelength of 780 nm and a broad calibrated measurement range from 488 to 1064 nm. This is comparable with or exceeding the performance of conventional wavemeters. Using this speckle wavemeter as part of a feedback loop, we stabilize a 780 nm diode laser to achieve a linewidth better than 1 MHz.
We measured the latency of a 100 km fibre link using a Correlation OTDR. Improvements over previous results were achieved by increasing the probe signal rate to 10 Gbit/s, using dispersion compensation gratings, and coupling the receiver time base to an external PPS signal.
Recently, a new device to measure the Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) electronic spectrum after elastic/inelastic scattering in a transmission electron microscope has been introduced. We modified the theoretical framework needed to describe conventional low loss electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) experiments in transmission electron microscopes (TEM) to study surface plasmons in metallic nanostructures, to allow for an OAM post selection and devise new experiments for the analysis of these excitations in nanostructures. We found that unprecedented information on the symmetries and on the chirality of the plasmonic modes can be retrieved even with limited OAM and energy resolutions.