We propose and experimentally demonstrate a large-scale, high-performance photonic computing platform that simultaneously combines light scattering and optical nonlinearity. The core processing unit consists in a disordered polycrystalline lithium niobate slab bottom-up assembled from nanocrystals. Assisted by random quasiphase-matching, nonlinear speckles are generated as the complex interplay between the simultaneous linear random scattering and the second-harmonic generation based on the quadratic optical nonlinearity of the material. Compared to linear random projection, such nonlinear feature extraction demonstrates universal performance improvement across various machine learning tasks in image classification, univariate and multivariate regression, and graph classification.
Spatial patterns are a significant characteristic of lasers. The knowledge of spatial patterns of structured laser beams is rapidly expanding, along with the progress of studies on laser physics and technology. Particularly in the last decades, owing to the in-depth attention on structured light with multiple degrees of freedom, the research on spatial and spatiotemporal structures of laser beams has been promptly developed. Such beams have hatched various breakthroughs in many fields, including imaging, microscopy, metrology, communication, optical trapping, and quantum information processing. Here, we would like to provide an overview of the extensive research on several areas relevant to spatial patterns of structured laser beams, from spontaneous organization to multiple transformations. These include the early theory of beam pattern formation based on the Maxwell–Bloch equations, the recent eigenmodes superposition theory based on the time-averaged Helmholtz equations, the beam patterns extension of ultrafast lasers to the spatiotemporal beam structures, and the structural transformations in the nonlinear frequency conversion process of structured beams.
We demonstrate the bleaching characteristics of Cr2+: CdSe (Cr: CdSe) crystal around 2 μm and prove that Cr: CdSe crystal is an effective saturable absorber to obtain Q-switched pulsed output in Tm3+-doped fiber laser pumped Ho: YAG system. The saturable absorption property of Cr: CdSe is investigated with a pulsed source at 2090 nm. The laserinduced damage threshold of uncoated Cr: CdSe is estimated around 9.92 J/cm2 at 2090 nm with the pulse duration of 30 ns. With the measured bleaching curve, the estimated pulse saturation fluence is around 1.06 J/cm2, and the estimated ground-state absorption cross section is 8.97×10-20 cm2, which is very close to the experimental value. The preliminary laser experiments are all finished with an antireflection coated Cr: CdSe crystal to reduce the insertion loss. The maximum output pulse energy is about 1.8 mJ with repetition frequency of 685 Hz, pulse duration of 15.4 ns, and pulse peak power of 115 kW. The pulsed laser wavelength is measured to be 2090.2 nm.
With increasing number of vehicles equipped with light detection and ranging (LIDAR), crosstalk is identified as a critical and urgent issue in the range detection for active collision avoidance. Chaotic pulse position modulation (CPPM) applied in the transmitting pulse train has been shown to prevent crosstalk as well as range ambiguity. However, static and unified strategy on discrimination threshold and the number of accumulated pulse is not valid against crosstalk with varying number of sources and varying intensity of each source. This paper presents an adaptive algorithm to distinguish the target echo from crosstalk with dynamic and unknown level of intensity in the context of intelligent vehicles. New strategy is given based on receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves that consider the detection requirements of the probability of detection and false alarm for the scenario with varying crosstalk. In the adaptive algorithm, the detected results are compared by the new strategy with both the number of accumulated pulses and the threshold being raised step by step, so that the target echo can be exactly identified from crosstalk with the dynamic and unknown level of intensity. The validity of the algorithm has been verified through the experiments with a single photon detector and the time correlated single photo counting (TCSPC) technique, demonstrating a marked drop in required shots for identifying the target compared with static and unified strategy
The effect of the combined guiding, the thermal induced guiding and gain guiding, on the beam quality in Nd:YVO4 MOPA laser is studied experimentally and theoretically. The beam quality enhancement is achieved during the power-amplification process in a 4-amplifier-stage Nd:YVO4 MOPA laser. 195 W TEM00 mode laser is achieved while its beam quality enhanced from M2=3.0 to 1.2 after power amplification. This is an interesting phenomenon since the beam quality is always deteriorated during the laser amplification. To explain the phenomenon of beam quality improvement, a theoretical model is established with the thermal induced guiding effect and gain guiding effect is considered, and a nonlinear dynamical equation of the laser mode in laser amplifier is derived. The wave equation is a Schrödinger-like two order nonlinear partial differential equation, and a symmetrical split-step Fourier mothed is developed to analyze the wave equation. Both experimental and theoretical results show that the combined guiding effect dominates the evolution of beam quality in the insensitive pumping Nd:YVO4 MOPA lasers, and the combined guiding effect can be employed to improve the performance of beam quality in MOPA lasers.
Visual dictionary learning as a crucial task of image representation has gained increasing attention. Specifically,
sparse coding is widely used due to its intrinsic advantage. In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous
latent semantic sparse coding model. The central idea is to bridge heterogeneous modalities by capturing their
common sparse latent semantic structure so that the learned visual dictionary is able to describe both the
visual and textual properties of training data. Experiments on both image categorization and retrieval tasks
demonstrate that our model shows superior performance over several recent methods such as K-means and Sparse
Coding.
A novel distributed-side-pumped configuration is presented for power scaling of solid-state slab lasers, which combines the advantages of both end-pumped and side-pumped geometries, realizing large absorption length and large pump area at the same time. In the distributed-side-pumped slab laser, the long gain medium can be divided into multiple segments (slab units), each of which adopts an end-pumped like geometry, thus the pump uniformity and the utilization ratio of the whole slab are greatly improved comparing to the end-pumped scheme. Furthermore, this configuration decouples the pump windows from the cooling areas, avoiding the necessity of water sealing the optical surfaces. The parameters of gain medium and pumping system are carefully optimized, while numerical calculation of thermal effects for composite slab and homogeneous slab are compared. An oscillator based the Nd:YAG slab that includes 5 slab units, is expected to produce CW output at 1 kW level, with the optical-optical efficiency of 52.6%. By adding more slab units, the distributed-side-pumped slab laser can be enhanced easily and efficiently.
We put forward a quasi-concentric laser resonator configuration employing a line-shaped end-pumping profile (QRLE). A thermal lensing modeling of the QRLE is developed, including the quartic phase deformation and the dependence of the thermal focal power on the TEM00 mode size at the thermal lens. Based on the calculation, we found that the dynamic operating point of the QRLE depends on both the resonator condition and the thermal effect condition. Furthermore, we predicted that the operating point in the subcritical region is insensitive to power fluctuation, i.e., the QRLE with extremely short cavity length is capable of stable operation. The validity of our prediction was well confirmed by theoretical modeling and experimental realization. Compared to conventional resonator designs, the QRLE resonator design produces the fundamental mode output with an LD bar instead of the fiber-coupled pump source and realizes good stability with short cavity length, demonstrating a clear advantage of both low cost and compactness. Based on the QRLE configuration, we produced >12 W pulsed TEM00 output, with the repetition rate of 30 kHz and optical-optical efficiency of 27%. The laser output mode is elaborately symmetrized in two directions in terms of beam quality, waist radius, and waist position.
We investigate the thermal lensing along the direction of heat removal in a zigzag slab laser by numerically computing
its temperature distribution, the OPD profile and the focal length of the thermal lens. Particular attention is paid to the
dependence of the curvature type of the thermal lens on the number of bounces. As the number of bounces increases
consecutively, the curvature type of the thermal lens in the slab thickness direction oscillates between the concave lens
and the convex one, but not in an alternate manner. The reason is disclosed that for the convex lens case, the average
temperature along the route, through which the ray on the edge of the main lobe aperture travels, is much lower than that
at the center. The formation of the concave lens can be well explained in a similar way. In addition, we conclude that the
beamlet with a larger number of bounces experiences weaker thermal lensing but more serious wavefront deformation
due to the large side lobe portion in the curve of optical path difference. The analysis and the discussion provide a good
reference for the design of slab parameters and the selection of the number of bounces. Furthermore, multiple zigzag
slabs with different curvature types of thermal lenses can be placed in a cavity or lined up as a multi-stage amplifier,
which may compensate the thermal lensing and the wavefront deformation, thus improving the beam quality.
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