Fiber Optic Tutorials

This is continuation from the previous tutorial - Polarimetry     1.  INTRODUCTION The three-dimensional imagery produced by holography accounts for most of the current popular interest in this technique. Conceptual applications, such as the holodeck seen on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and actual applications, like the widespread use of embossed holograms on book and magazine covers and credit cards, have fascinated and captured the imagination of millions. Holography was discovered in 1947 by Gabor and revived in the early 1960s through the work of Leith and Upatnieks. Since that time, most practitioners in the field believe that...

This is a continuation from the previous tutorial - Polymer optical fibers   The potential of single-crystal fibers was recognized 50 years ago, when the inherent strength and perfection of the crystalline matrix of the fibers were determined. Despite this, sustained research into the production of such fibers was delayed until the 1970s. Until then, control over the growth characteristics of the fibers was poor, and there were no well-defined areas of utilization. The first application that drove the production of single-crystal sapphire fibers was use as a reinforcing member for metal-matrix composites. Sapphire, whose chemical formula is \(\text{Al}_2\text{O}_3\), was...

This is a continuation from the previous tutorial - Stable two - mirror resonators   A very useful generalized form of paraxial optics has been developed in recent years. This generalized form can handle paraxial wave propagation not only in free space, and in simple lenses and ducts, but also in more general types of paraxial optical systems, including cascaded multielement optical systems (cascaded sequences of paraxial optical elements), and also systems having "soft apertures" or quadratic amplitude as well as phase variations about the axis. This more general type of paraxial wave theory can be expressed in several mathematically equivalent...

This is continuation from the previous tutorial - Interferometers     1.  POLARIMETERS Polarimeters are optical instruments used for determining the polarization properties of light beams and samples. Polarimetry, the science of measuring polarization, is most simply characterized as radiometry with polarization elements. To perform accurate polarimetry, all the issues necessary for careful and accurate radiometry must be considered, together with many additional polarization issues. In this tutorial, our emphasis is strictly on those additional polarization issues which must be mastered to accurately determine polarization properties from polarimetric measurements. Typical applications of polarimeters include the following: remote sensing of the earth...

This is a continuation from the previous tutorial - Rate-adaptable optical transmission and elastic optical networks     1.  SPACE-DIVISION MULTIPLEXING IN OPTICAL FIBERS  The capacity of fiber-optic communication systems has been increasing continuously by two to three orders of magnitude over the last two decades. Coherent optical communication has provided the most recent capacity improvements, reaching a performance close to the theoretical limit imposed on standard single-mode fibers \(\text{(SMFs)}\) by Shannon’s formula in combination with nonlinear effects. In order to substantially increase the capacity of optical fibers, only one option, involving the introduction of multiple parallel optical paths, is left....