Fibre-optic components fabricated on the same substrate as integrated circuits are important for future high-speed communications. One industry response has been the costly push to develop indium phosphide (InP) electronics. However, for fabrication simplicity, reliability and cost, gallium arsenide (GaAs) remains the established technology for integrated optoelectronics. Unfortunately, the GaA...

Distributed strain measurements on synthetic fibre ropes as used in marine applications are reported. The ropes incorporate single mode fibre-optic sensors for strain measurement. A Brillouin-amplification-based distributed strain measuring system has been utilised to interrogate the fibre sensors incorporated into a parallel yarn aramid rope. Initial results are presented to conclusively demon...

The optical destruction thresholds of conventionally etched and tube-etched near-field optical probes were measured. One of the main advantages of tube-etched tips is their smooth glass surface after taper formation. Presumably for this reason, a destruction limit of over 120 microJ was obtained, almost twice as large as that of the rougher, conventionally etched fibre probes. The use of additi...

We propose a fibre-based approach for generation of optical frequency combs (OFC) with the aim of calibration of astronomical spectrographs in the low and medium-resolution range. This approach includes two steps: in the first step, an appropriate state of optical pulses is generated and subsequently moulded in the second step delivering the desired OFC. More precisely, the first step is realis...

Continued progress in both civil and military radio-frequency (RF) digital avionics applications is overstressing the capabilities and reliability of existing RF communication networks based on coaxial cables on board modern aircrafts. Future avionics systems will require high-bandwidth on-board communication links that are lightweight, immune to electromagnetic interference, and highly reliabl...

Active manipulation of light in optical fibres has been extensively studied with great interest because of its compatibility with diverse fibre-optic systems. While graphene exhibits a strong electro-optic effect originating from its gapless Dirac-fermionic band structure, electric control of all-fibre graphene devices remains still highly challenging. Here we report electrically manipulable in...

Optically assisted transfection is emerging as a powerful and versatile method for the delivery of foreign therapeutic agents to cells at will. In particular the use of ultrashort pulse lasers has proved an important route to transiently permeating the cell membrane through a multiphoton process. Though optical transfection has been gaining wider usage to date, all incarnations of this techniqu...

A short pulse reflected off a single sampled fibre grating is used as a transmitter, and a second sampled fibre grating with a photodiode is used as a receiver. This provides a simple encoding/decoding solution, applicable to optical CDMA networks. Introduction Optical code division multiplexing (CDM) has been proposed as an alternative to time-division multiplexing (TDM) and wavelength-divisio...

Introduction Recent studies have shown that Fibre Bragg Gratings are well suited to studying the mechanical behaviour of composites [1]. A Fibre Bragg Grating is a small segment of optical fibre with a core of germanium doped silica which gives a periodic and permanent perturbation of the refractive index. An FBG acts like a selective wavelength mirror, reflecting a particular wavelength (Fig. ...

In this paper, we present the simulative analysis of 32 × 2.5 Gb/s DWDM metro system with 100GHz channel spacing using SMF-28 and the Negative Dispersion Fibre (NDF) such as MetroCor which enhances the capabilities of the metropolitan area optical systems while at the same time reducing the system cost by eliminating the need of dispersion compensation. It is observed that MetroCor fibre outper...