Quantum cascade laser (QCL) emitting in the mid-wave infrared atmospheric windows (3 to 5 μm) will be of immediate use to several civilian applications, including airborne self-defense protection system and trace gas sensing and free space optical communications. When the output power of a single QCL is too low, the beams of different lasers can be combined by incoherent beam combining. For incoherent beam combining the laser beams are arranged side by side on the aperture of the laser system and combine in the farfield. Incoherent beam combining has been applied very successfully to diode lasers with high robustness and reliability due to it is neither limited to any number of lasers nor to any laser characteristics. This technique is demonstrated to be compatible with QCLs in this work. In this paper, the method of incoherent beam combination of 4 independent QCL emitters with a 0.1 W continuous wave power at room temperature each is studied. Results show that the incoherent power superposition of mid-infrared QCLs can be achieved by beam combining with an efficiency of not less than 90%. The output farfield divergence angle is about 5 mrad, which is consistent with the farfield divergence angle of the four subbeams.
In high-power laser systems, the optics suffers from different degrees of damage due to high-power laser irradiation. Studying the laser-induced damage generation and growth law of the optics is greatly benefited by the ability to accurately predict how damage sites evolve with laser exposure. In this work, the laser-induced damage growth model in optics under high-power laser irradiation is described based on the Weibull distribution model. A parameter method for solving Weibull distribution model by using the least-square method is proposed. In addition, a Monte-Carlo analysis method is used to numerically simulate the growth law of laser-induced damage in optics based on the statistical theory. Furthermore, we have also predict the laser-induced damage growth trend for 20 shots in high-power laser systems.
The mid-infrared band of 3~5 μm wavelength is a very important atmospheric window. The mid-infrared lasers are widely applied in laser countermeasure, laser illumination and trace gas detection. At present, the mid-infrared laser sources mainly include solid-state optical parametric oscillation lasers, fiber lasers, mid-infrared supercontinuum spectrum laser and mid-infrared semiconductor lasers, i.e. quantum cascade lasers. In these lasers, quantum cascade laser is the only one that can realize the conversion from electricity to light. In this paper, the method of incoherent beam combination of mid-infrared semiconductor lasers is studied. Two lasers are combined in a common aperture by using a single polarizer based on the polarization characteristics of the output laser of quantum cascade laser. Results show that the incoherent power superposition of mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers can be achieved by polarization beam combining, and the beam combining efficiency is not less than 90%. The farfield divergence angle is about 5 mrad, which is consistent with the farfield divergence angle of the two sub-beams.
Aiming to realize super resolution(SR) to single image and video reconstruction, a super resolution camera model is proposed for the problem that the resolution of the images obtained by traditional cameras behave comparatively low. To achieve this function we put a certain driving device such as piezoelectric ceramics in the camera. By controlling the driving device, a set of continuous low resolution(LR) images can be obtained and stored instantaneity, which reflect the randomness of the displacements and the real-time performance of the storage very well. The low resolution image sequences have different redundant information and some particular priori information, thus it is possible to restore super resolution image factually and effectively. The sample method is used to derive the reconstruction principle of super resolution, which analyzes the possible improvement degree of the resolution in theory. The super resolution algorithm based on learning is used to reconstruct single image and the variational Bayesian algorithm is simulated to reconstruct the low resolution images with random displacements, which models the unknown high resolution image, motion parameters and unknown model parameters in one hierarchical Bayesian framework. Utilizing sub-pixel registration method, a super resolution image of the scene can be reconstructed. The results of 16 images reconstruction show that this camera model can increase the image resolution to 2 times, obtaining images with higher resolution in currently available hardware levels.
The need for a portable image acquiring system has become as strong as the extension of digital imaging technology, for this, a new mono-centric wide-field optical system is proposed. Recently, some high-resolution and wide-field imaging systems have been raised already, with which fairly clear and wide field of view (FOV) images could be easily obtained, however, their sizes are comparatively too large to be conveniently carried . With ZEMAX, a new optical design is emulated by scaling the structure of current wide-field optical systems and introducing the proposed lens-let arrays, the size of the whole system is comparatively smaller with the structure consisting of a two-glass mono-centric lens, lens-let array (the lenses in the array can be different), and a specific detector. Lens-let array is used to make the image plane from curve to almost flat. This hardware is small enough to apply to helmets and computers and the FOV of which is wide. Verified by a series of merit function, this optical design is found to have an acceptable imaging resolution and the computational imaging method is applied to this system to acquire a higher imaging resolution. From each lens-let a series of low resolution images are obtained and in this system a high-resolution image can be retrieved from multiple low-resolution images with super-resolution reconstruction method. Compared from the size and the imaging resolution, this new optical design is much smaller and has a higher imaging resolution.
The incident light will be scattered away due to the inhomogeneity of the refractive index in many materials which will greatly reduce the imaging depth and degrade the imaging quality. Many exciting methods have been presented in recent years for solving this problem and realizing imaging through a highly scattering medium, such as the wavefront modulation technique and reconstruction technique. The imaging method based on compressed sensing (CS) theory can decrease the computational complexity because it doesn't require the whole speckle pattern to realize reconstruction. One of the key premises of this method is that the object is sparse or can be sparse representation. However, choosing a proper projection matrix is very important to the imaging quality. In this paper, we analyzed that the transmission matrix (TM) of a scattering medium obeys circular Gaussian distribution, which makes it possible that a scattering medium can be used as the measurement matrix in the CS theory. In order to verify the performance of this method, a whole optical system is simulated. Various projection matrices are introduced to make the object sparse, including the fast Fourier transform (FFT) basis, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) basis and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) basis, the imaging performances of each of which are compared comprehensively. Simulation results show that for most targets, applying the discrete wavelet transform basis will obtain an image in good quality. This work can be applied to biomedical imaging and used to develop real-time imaging through highly scattering media.
In this paper, the single photon detection principle of Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM) device is introduced. The main noise factors that infect the sensitivity of the electro-optical detection system are analyzed, including background light noise, detector dark noise, preamplifier noise and signal light noise etc. The Optical, electrical and thermodynamic methods are used to suppress the SiPM electro-optical detection system noise, which improved the response sensitivity of the detector. Using SiPM optoelectronic detector with a even high sensitivity, together with small field large aperture optical system, high cutoff narrow bandwidth filters, low-noise operational amplifier circuit, the modular design of functional circuit, semiconductor refrigeration technology, greatly improved the sensitivity of optical detection system, reduced system noise and achieved long-range detection of weak laser radiation signal. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed methods are reasonable and efficient.
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