The pandemic of respiratory diseases enlightened people that monitoring respiration has promising prospects in averting many fatalities by tracking the development of diseases. However, the response speed of current optical fiber sensors is still insufficient to meet the requirements of high-frequency respiratory detection during respiratory failure. Here, a scheme for a fast and stable tachypnea monitor is proposed utilizing a water-soluble C₆₀-Lys ion compound as functional material for the tracking of humidity change in the progression of breath. The polarization of C₆₀-Lys can be tuned by the ambient relative humidity change, and an apparent refractive index alteration can be detected due to the small size effect. In our experiments, C₆₀-Lys is conformally and uniformly deposited on the surface of a tilted fiber Bragg grating (TFBG) to fabricate an ultra-fast-response, high-sensitivity, and long-term stable optical fiber humidity sensor. A relative humidity (RH) detecting sensitivity of 0.080 dB/% RH and the equilibrium response time and recovery time of 1.85 s and 1.58 s are observed, respectively. Also, a linear relation is detected between the resonance intensity of the TFBG and the environment RH. In a practical breath monitoring experiment, the instantaneous response time and recovery time are measured as 40 ms and 41 ms, respectively, during a 1.5 Hz fast breath process. Furthermore, an excellent time stability and high repeatability are exhibited in experiments conducted over a range of 7 days.

The compact, sensitive, and multidimensional displacement measurement device plays a crucial role in semiconductor manufacture and high-resolution optical imaging. The metasurface offers a promising solution to develop high-precision displacement metrology. In this work, we proposed and experimentally demonstrated a two-dimensional displacement (XZ) measurement device by a dielectric metasurface. Both transversal and longitudinal displacements of the metasurface can be obtained by the analysis of the interference optical intensity that is generated by the deflected light beams while the metasurface is under linearly polarized incidence. We experimentally demonstrated that displacements down to 5.4 nm along the x-axis and 0.12 µm along the z-axis can be resolved with a 900 µm × 900 µm metasurface. Our work opens up new possibilities to develop a compact high-precision multidimensional displacement sensor.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) allows a direct and precise measurement of laser welding depth by coaxially measuring the keyhole depth and can be used for process monitoring and control. When OCT measurement was taken during single-beam laser welding, the keyhole instability of aluminum welding resulted in highly scattered OCT data and complicated the welding depth extraction methods. As a combination of an inner core beam and an outer ring beam, a novel adjustable ring mode (ARM) laser for producing a stable keyhole was applied to the OCT measurement. Different ARM laser power arrangements were conducted on aluminum and copper. The results indicated that the ring beam greatly improved the stability of the core beam-induced keyhole, and smooth welding depth can be extracted from the concentrated OCT data.

We propose an absolute distance measurement method that employs heterodyne and superheterodyne combined interferometers to achieve synchronous detection and demodulation of multiwavelengths. Coarse and fine synthetic wavelengths are generated by a dual-longitudinal-mode He–Ne laser and four acoustic optical frequency shifters. Further, to improve phase synchronization measurement for multiwavelengths, we analyze the demodulation characteristics of coarse and fine measurement signals and adopt a demodulation method suitable for both signals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve high-precision synchronous demodulation of multiwavelengths, and standard deviation is 1.7 × 10^-5 m in a range of 2 m.

A new electronic speckle pattern interferometry method is proposed to realize in situ deformation measurements. The feature of the method is the combination of a high-speed camera and multiple laser Doppler vibrometers (LDVs) for synchronous measurements. The high-speed camera is used to record and select effective interferograms, while the LDVs are used to measure the rigid body displacement caused by vibrations. A series of effective interferograms with known shifted phase values are obtained to calculate the deformation phase. The experimental results show that the method performs well in measuring static and dynamic deformations with high accuracy in vibrating environments.

We demonstrate a simultaneous transmission of time-frequency and data over a 160-km urban business network in Shanghai. The signals are transmitted through a cascaded optical link consisting of 48 km and 32 km, which are connected by an optical relay. The metrological signals are inserted into the communication network using dense wavelength division multiplexing. The influence of the interference between different signals has been discussed. The experimental results demonstrate that the radio frequency (RF) instability can reach 2.1×10-14 at 1 s and 2.3×10-17 at 10,000 s, and the time interval transfer of one pulse per second (1 PPS) signal with less than 10 ps at 1 s is obtained. This work paves the way for the widespread dissemination of ultra-stable time and frequency signals over the communication networks.

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are progressively favored for room-temperature magnetic field measurement. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) optimization for NV diamond magnetometry generally concentrates on signal amplitude enhancement rather than efficient noise processing. Here, we report a compound filter system combining a wavelet denoising method and an adaptive filter for the realization of an efficient weak magnetic measurement with a high SNR. It allows enhanced magnetic field measurement with an average SNR enhancement of 17.80 dB at 50 nT within 500 mHz to 100 Hz and 14.76 dB at 500 mHz within 50 nT to 1100 nT. The introduction of this system in NV diamond magnetometry is aimed to improve signal quality by effectively eliminating the noise and retaining ideal signals.

Fluorescence detection is widely used in biology and medicine, while the realization of on-chip fluorescence detection is vital for the portable and point-of-care test (POCT) application. In this Letter, we propose an efficient fluorescence excitation and collection system using an integrated GaN chip consisting of a slot waveguide and a one-dimensional photonic crystal (1D PC) waveguide. The slot waveguide is used to confine the excitation light for intense light–sample interaction, and the one-trip collection efficiency at the end of slot waveguide is up to 14.65%. More interestingly, due to the introduction of the 1D PC waveguide, the fluorescence signal is directly filtered out, and the excitation light is reflected to the slot waveguide for multiple excitations. Its transmittances for the designed exciting wavelength of 520 nm and the fluorescent wavelength of 612 nm are 0.2% and 85.4%, respectively. Finally, based on numerical analysis, the total fluorescence collection efficiency in our system amounts to 15.93%. It is the first time, to our knowledge, that the concept of an all-in-one-chip fluorescence detection system has been proposed, which paves the way for on-chip fluorescence excitation and collection, and may find potential applications of miniaturized and portable devices for biomedical fluorescence detection.

We propose a method for reconstructing non-diffuse surfaces based on the π-phase-shifted two-plus-one phase-shifting method. First, we introduce a 2f_H + a + 2f_M + 2f_L method for unwrapped phase extraction. Subsequently, we introduce a new set of π-phase-shifted 2f_H + a/2 + 2f_M + 2f_L fringe patterns with halved background intensity. The saturated pixels will be replaced with the unsaturated pixels in the π-phase-shifted fringe patterns. Finally, we analyze eight fringe replacement cases and give the corresponding phase calculation, and further give the general formulas. Experiments confirm that the sum of the phase error of the proposed method is 81.4% lower than that of the traditional method, and 61.5% lower than that of the adaptive fringe projection method.

In this Letter, we propose a simple structure of an orthogonal type double Michelson interferometer. The orthogonal detection method overcomes the problems of uneven ranging sensitivity and the inability of traditional interferometers to determine the displacement direction. The displacement measurement principle and signal processing method of the orthogonal double interferometer are studied. Unlike the arctangent algorithm, the displacement analysis uses the arc cosine algorithm, avoiding any pole limit in the distance analysis process. The minimum step size of the final experimental displacement system is 5 nm, which exhibits good repeatability, and the average error is less than 0.12 nm.