A micromachined sensor array for making optical measurements of surface pressure distributions has been designed, fabricated and tested. Each sensor element in the array consists of a Fabry-Perot etalon fabricated from single-crystal silicon. Illuminating the sensor array with a near-infrared, tunable diode laser and detecting the reflected light intensity with an infrared camera allows remote,...

The transmission spectra of a Fabry-Perot etalon coupled to a microtoroid resonator are studied theoretically and experimentally. The resonance line shapes depend strongly on the resonance wavelength detuning and coupling strength between the two resonators. A wide variety of line shapes, ranging from a single to triple peaks, symmetric to asymmetric Fano-like peaks, and notches were predicted ...

A single frequency Ti:sapphire (Ti:S) laser with continuous frequency-tuning and low intensity noise is presented, in which an extra nonlinear (NL) loss crystal is placed inside the resonator instead of the traditional etalon locking system. When a NL crystal is inserted into a home-made Ti:S laser resonator, the single frequency laser of 1.27 W at 795 nm with a continuous frequency-tuning rang...

Tunable narrow-linewidth lasers first became commercially available around 20 years ago with the development of etalon-narrowed CW dye lasers from manufacturers such as Coherent and Spectra-Physics. By 1977, high-end research systems could produce linewidths as narrow as 1 MHz under basic microprocessor control. Evolution of these lasers continued with the introduction of higher-gain ring laser...

A new optical parametric oscillator (OPO) for the mid-infrared wavelength region of 3-3.8mum with an idler output power of up to 1.5 W has been developed. The singly resonant OPO is pumped by a single-mode, 10-W, continuous-wave Nd:YAG laser and consists of a bow-tie ring cavity with a fan-out periodically poled lithium niobate crystal and a low-finesse intracavity air-spaced etalon. The single...

We report a narrow-linewidth ZnGeP2 (ZGP) optical parametric oscillator (OPO). It employs a Q-switched Nd:YAG-laser-pumped LiNbO3 OPO with an output at l 5 2.55 mm that is used as a pump for the ZGP OPO. With the singly resonant type II ZGP OPO cavity containing a diffraction grating and a Si etalon, we achieved mid-IR tunability from 3.7 to 8 mm with an output linewidth of ;0.1 cm21, correspon...

We exploit recently developed topology-optimization techniques to design complex, wavelength-scale resonators for enhancing various nonlinear χ(2) and χ(3) frequency conversion processes. In particular, we demonstrate aperiodic, multi-track ring resonators and two-dimensional slab microcavities exhibiting long lifetimes Q≳104, small modal volumes V≳(λ/2n)3<...

We present airborne measurements of a novel eye-safe spectrally broadband LIDAR capable of dealing with the atmospherically-induccd variations in CO2 absorption using a Fabry-Perot based detector. The Fabry-Perot solid etalon in the receiver part is tuned to match the wavelength of several CO2 absorption lines simultaneously. The broadband technique tremendously reduces the requirement for sour...

Brillouin microscopy has recently emerged as powerful technique to characterize the mechanical properties of biological tissue, cell and biomaterials. However, the potential of Brillouin microscopy is currently limited to transparent samples, because Brillouin spectrometers do not have sufficient spectral extinction to reject the predominant non-Brillouin scattered light of turbid media. To ove...