D J Ives, National Physical Laboratory UK. ([email protected]) Abstract Many of the sources used in optical fibre systems are highly polarised and thus for highly accurate power measurements the polarisation dependent response (PDR) of the power meter becomes an important parameter. The use of Optical Spectrum Analysers (OSA) to test components and measure the relative powers in WDM systems ...

Two fundamental laser physics phenomena--dissipative soliton and polarisation of light are recently merged to the concept of vector dissipative soliton (VDS), viz. train of short pulses with specific state of polarisation (SOP) and shape defined by an interplay between anisotropy, gain/loss, dispersion, and nonlinearity. Emergence of VDSs is both of the fundamental scientific interest and is al...

A key aspect of animal development is the appropriate polarisation of different cell types in the right place at the right time. Such polarisation is often precisely coordinated relative to the axes of a tissue or organ, but the mechanisms underlying this coordination are still poorly understood. Nevertheless, genetic analysis of animal development has revealed some of the pathways involved. Fo...

A Monte Carlo light scattering code incorporating aligned non-spherical particles is described. The major effects on the flux distribution, linear polarisation and circular polarisation are presented, with emphasis on the application to Young Stellar Objects (YSOs). The need for models with non-spherical particles in order to successfully model polarisation data is reviewed. The ability of this...

High-spectral resolution polarisation measurements of the clear daylight sky reveal an unexpected rich spectral fine-structure in the polarisation superimposed on the more familiar broad-band continuum. This polarisation spectrum shows the spectral fingerprints of scattering and absorption processes which is illustrated with radiative transfer calculations. In particular, radiative transfer cal...

This paper addresses ship detection in TerraSAR-X single-look high-resolution spotlight data by using a global thresholding approach, which is based on statistical analysis of the test data. The corresponding thresholds were determined separately from the exponential and chi-squared distributions for TerraSAR-X single-polarisation (HH or VV) and dual-polarisation (HH and VV) data. From the resu...

Polarisation vision is used by a variety of species in many important tasks, including navigation and orientation (e.g. desert ant), communication and signalling (e.g. stomatopod crustaceans), and as a possible substitute for colour vision (e.g. cephalopod molluscs). Fiddler crabs are thought to possess the anatomical structures necessary to detect polarised light, and occupy environments rich ...

We extend the analysis of Gabor transforms on a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature map (Hansen, Górski & Hivon 2002) to polarisation. We study the temperature and polarisation power spectra on the cut sky, the so-called pseudo power spectra. The transformation kernels relating the full-sky polarisation power spectra and the polarisation pseudo power spectra are found to be similar to...

We developed an on-line intelligent argumentation system which facilitates stakeholders in exchanging dialogues. It provides decision support by capturing stakeholders’ rationale through arguments. As part of the argumentation process, stakeholders tend to both polarise their opinions and form polarisation groups. The challenging issue of assessing argumentation polarisation had not been addres...

Polarisation measurements of pulsars and of their pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) are uniquely able to provide deep insights into the highly magnetised relativistic environment of young, rotationpowered isolated neutron stars (INSs). Besides the radio band, optical observations are primarily suited to providing such insights. The first INS for which optical polarisation observations were performed i...