Reconfigurable liquid metal fiber-optic mirror for continuous, widely-tunable true-time-delay.

This paper reports the demonstration of a widely-translatable fiber-optic mirror based on the motion of liquid metal through the hollow core of a photonic bandgap fiber. By moving a liquid metal mirror within the hollow core of an optical fiber, large, continuous changes in optical path length are achieved in a comparatively small package. A fiber-optic device is demonstrated which provided a continuously-variable optical path length of over 3.

Comparison of parallel-plate and in-plane poled polymer films for terahertz sensing.

We have performed calculations and measurements of the efficacy of two poling geometries of poled electro-optic (EO) polymer films for use in sensing terahertz (THz) radiation via EO sampling. Taking reflective and absorptive losses into consideration, we find that a parallel-plate (PP) poled film has a sensitivity maximum when oriented at 55 degrees to the incident probe and THz beams. In addition, we show that our in-plane (IP) poled polymer films are comparable in sensitivity to PP-poled films and discuss the potential for improving IP-poled polymer devices.