A microfluidic oscillatory cross-slot flow is used to visualize birefringent strands in dilute polystyrene solutions with high temporal resolution, focusing specifically on reversals in the flow direction. Due to polymer conformation hysteresis, the elastic strands are slow to relax and demonstrate a compressive modulus, resulting in a “buckling instability.” An elastic loop of birefringence fo...

We present a consistent, generally covariant quantization of light for non-vacuum birefringent, Lorentz-symmetry breaking electrodynamics in the context of the Standard Model Extension. We find that the number of light quanta in the field is not frame independent, and that the interaction of the quantized field with matter is necessarily birefringent. We also show that the conventional Lorenz g...

Highly birefringent (Hi-Bi) air-clad silica microfibers (MFs) with wavelength and sub-wavelength scale transverse dimensions are studied theoretically and experimentally. Hi-Bi MFs are taper-drawn from the standard SMF-28 single mode fibers that are "pre-processed" by "cutting away" parts of the silica cladding on opposite sides of the fiber with a femtosecond infrared laser. Such Hi-Bi MFs hav...

In the presence of strong magnetic fields, the vacuum becomes a birefringent medium. We show that this QED effect decouples the polarization modes of photons leaving the NS surface. Both the total intensity and the intensity in each of the two modes is preserved along a ray’s path through the neutron-star magnetosphere. We analyze the consequences that this effect has on aligning the observed p...

Polarization mode dispersion is the effect of signal broadening in a fiber with birefringent disorder. The disorder, frozen into the fiber, is characterized by the so-called vector of birefringence (VB). In a linear medium a pulse broadens as the two principal states of polarization split. It is well-known that, under the action of short-correlated disorder, naturally present in fibers, the dis...

In this study we present a noninvasive and nonradioactive glucose in vitro measurement technique using the Mueller polarization analytical model. The glucose solution and aqueous humor phantoms are illuminated with a He-Ne (632.8 nm) laser. This in vitro study provides a base and reference data for in vivo eye glucose monitoring. The 16 Mueller polarization matrix element images give informatio...

A novel formalism for determining the source-induced noise in Stokes parameter measurements is derived for sources with Gaussian statistics. The formalism is based on a concise expression for the autocovariance functions of the Stokes parameters in terms of the second-order correlation properties of the optical field. At the output of an optical system, source-induced noise can result not only ...

We critically review the recent progress in understanding soliton propagation in birefringent optical fibers. By constructing the most general bright two-soliton solution of the integrable coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equation (Manakov model) we point out that solitons in birefringent fibers can in general change their shape after interaction due to a change in the intensity distribution among...

We examine analytically, numerically, and experimentally the phase shift incurred by a soliton pulse when it collides with a copropagating, orthogonally polarized soliton pulse in a highly birefringent optical fiber. Use of a well-known average variational principle and a Gaussian ansatz reduces the dynamics to a set of ordinary differential equations for which an approximate analytic solution ...

A complete analysis of the eigenstate of polarization (ESOP’s) in a Brillouin fiber ring laser using fibers with a high circular birefringence is proposed in this paper. Conditions to obtain circular ESOP’s for application in a Brillouin fiber optic current sensor are highlighted as well as conditions to have stable ESOP’s for applications in other passive or active sensors. Measurements are pe...