Fiber-laser sensors have potential advantages over conventional fiber-optic interferometric sensors owing to their simplicity in both optical configuration and electronic signal processing." A fiber ring laser is a good candidate for rotation-rate sensing because of the same advantages, and such a fiber-ring-laser gyroscope was demonstrated by use of Brillouin gain in the fiber.4'5 The Brilloui...

We present a simple modulation-free technique to stabilize a laser frequency to the Doppler-free spectra of an atomic vapor. Polarization spectroscopy with use of a balanced polarimeter allows us to obtain a background-free dispersion signal suitable for high-speed and robust frequency stabilization. We employed the method to the 5S(1/2) F = 2 --> 5P(3/2) F' = 3 transition of 87Rb atoms. The ac...

Electric-field-induced birefringence of a polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystal BPLC is investigated. In the low field region, conventional Kerr effect holds. As the electric field increases, the induced birefringence gradually saturates and deviates from Kerr effect. An exponential convergence model, called extended Kerr effect, is proposed to fit the experimental data. Good agreement b...

The inverse Faraday effect (IFE) in superconductors is proposed, where a static magnetization generated under the influence of circularly polarized microwave field. Classical modeling IFE explicitly provides superconducting gyration coefficient terms its complex conductivity. then considered as source nonlinearity and gyrotropy even at low-power regime giving rise to spectrum phenomena applicat...

X-ray absorption in lithium tantalate induces large, long-lived (∼10 5 s) optical birefringence, visualized via scanning optical polarimetry. Similar birefringence measured from glass, sapphire, and quartz was two orders of magnitude weaker; much of this reduction can be accounted for by their smaller cross section for x-ray absorption. While x-ray induced charges can perturb local refractive i...

Sea-urchin zygote mitotic apparatus (MA) isolated in a glycerol/dimethylsulphoxide medium were treated with pressure. Pressure treatment had no effect on spindle birefringence when MA were in full-strength isolation medium. After placing MA in quarter-strength isolation medium, pressures of 4-0 X 10(3)-1-8 X 10(4) lbf in.-2 (2 X 76 X 10(4)-I X 24 X 10(5) k N m-2) for 15 min caused reduction of ...

A novel fiber optic hydrophone based on the integration of a dual polarization fiber grating laser and an elastic diaphragm is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The diaphragm transforms the acoustic pressure into transversal force acting on the laser cavity which changes the fiber birefringence and therefore the beat frequency between the two polarization lines. The proposed hydrophone ...

Recent research has established that nonsymmetric gravitation theories like Moffat’s NGT predict that a gravitational field singles out an orthogonal pair of polarization states of light that propagate with different phase velocities. We show that a much wider class of nonmetric theories encompassed by the χg formalism predict such violations of the Einstein equivalence principle. This gravity-...