Search Results

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Item
    Ultrafast laser inscription of asymmetric integrated waveguide 3 dB couplers for astronomical K-band interferometry at the CHARA array
    (Washington, DC : Soc., 2021) Benoît, Aurélien; Pike, Fraser A.; Sharma, Tarun K.; MacLachlan, David G.; Dinkelaker, Aline N.; Nayak, Abani S.; Madhav, Kalaga; Roth, Martin M.; Labadie, Lucas; Pedretti, Ettore; Brummelaar, Theo A. ten; Scott, Nic; Coudé du Foresto, Vincent; Thomson, Robert R.
    We present the fabrication and characterization of 3 dB asymmetric directional couplers for the astronomical K-band at wavelengths between 2.0 and 2.4 µm. The couplers were fabricated in commercial Infrasil silica glass using an ultrafast laser operating at 1030 nm. After optimizing the fabrication parameters, the insertion losses of straight single-mode waveguides were measured to be ∼1.2±0.5dB across the full K-band. We investigate the development of asymmetric 3 dB directional couplers by varying the coupler interaction lengths and by varying the width of one of the waveguide cores to detune the propagation constants of the coupled modes. In this manner, we demonstrate that ultrafast laser inscription is capable of fabricating asymmetric 3 dB directional couplers for future applications in K-band stellar interferometry. Finally, we demonstrate that our couplers exhibit an interferometric fringe contrast of >90%. This technology paves the path for the development of a two-telescope K-band integrated optic beam combiner for interferometry to replace the existing beam combiner (MONA) in Jouvence of the Fiber Linked Unit for Recombination (JouFLU) at the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) telescope array.
  • Item
    First stellar photons for an integrated optics discrete beam combiner at the William Herschel Telescope
    (Washington, DC : The Optical Society, 2021) Nayak, Abani Shankar; Labadie, Lucas; Sharma, Tarun Kumar; Piacentini, Simone; Corrielli, Giacomo; Osellame, Roberto; Gendron, Éric; Buey, Jean-Tristan M.; Chemla, Fanny; Cohen, Mathieu; Bharmal, Nazim A.; Bardou, Lisa F.; Staykov, Lazar; Osborn, James; Morris, Timothy J.; Pedretti, Ettore; Dinkelaker, Aline N.; Madhav, Kalaga V.; Roth, Martin M.
    We present the first on-sky results of a four-telescope integrated optics discrete beam combiner (DBC) tested at the 4.2mWilliamHerschel Telescope. The device consists of a four-input pupil remapper followed by a DBC and a 23-output reformatter. The whole device was written monolithically in a single alumino-borosilicate substrate using ultrafast laser inscription. The device was operated at astronomical H-band (1.6 μm), and a deformable mirror along with a microlens array was used to inject stellar photons into the device. We report the measured visibility amplitudes and closure phases obtained on Vega and Altair that are retrieved using the calibrated transfer matrix of the device. While the coherence function can be reconstructed, the on-sky results show significant dispersion from the expected values. Based on the analysis of comparable simulations, we find that such dispersion is largely caused by the limited signal-to-noise ratio of our observations. This constitutes a first step toward an improved validation of theDBCas a possible beam combination scheme for long-baseline interferometry. © 2021 Optical Society of America.
  • Item
    High-speed dual color fluorescence lifetime endomicroscopy for highly-multiplexed pulmonary diagnostic applications and detection of labeled bacteria
    (Washington, DC : OSA, 2019) Pedretti, Ettore; Tanner, Michael G.; Choudhary, Tushar R.; Krstajic, Nikola; Megia-Fernandez, Alicia; Henderson, Robert K.; Bradley, Mark; Thomson, Robert R.; Girkin, John M.; Dhaliwal, Kevin; Dalgarno, Paul A.
    We present a dual-color laser scanning endomicroscope capable of fluorescence lifetime endomicroscopy at one frame per second (FPS). The scanning system uses a coherent imaging fiber with 30,000 cores. High-speed lifetime imaging is achieved by distributing the signal over an array of 1024 parallel single-photon avalanche diode detectors (SPADs), minimizing detection dead-time maximizing the number of photons detected per excitation pulse without photon pile-up to achieve the high frame rate. This also enables dual color fluorescence imaging by temporally shifting the dual excitation lasers, with respect to each other, to separate the two spectrally distinct fluorescent decays in time. Combining the temporal encoding, to provide spectral separation, with lifetime measurements we show a one FPS, multi-channel endomicroscopy platform for clinical applications and diagnosis. We demonstrate the potential of the system by imaging SmartProbe labeled bacteria in ex vivo samples of human lung using lifetimeto differentiate bacterial fluorescence from the strong background lung autofluorescence which was used to provide structural information.