Publications by authors named "J L Blows"

We present a new all-optical technique to measure the thermal conductivity of laser crystals. This technique can be used for crystals that are too small for direct measurement of thermal conductivity. We used this technique to measure the thermal conductivities of Nd:LYAB, with the result of 44 +/- 6% compared with that of Nd:YAG thermal conductivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We present what are to our knowledge the first gain and noise-figure measurements of a fiber optical parametric amplifier pumped by a simple frequency-modulated source. The maximum gain was 27.2 dB and the average noise figure was 4.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We demonstrate that an optical regenerator architecture providing re-amplification, re-shaping, and re-timing based on the principle of spectral shift followed by filtering can lead to bit error ratio improvement of the signal passing through it. This is in contrast with typical regenerators based on the usual principle of power conversion from a transfer function, which are unable to improve the bit error ratio. At first, we provide the theoretical basis that explains this improvement.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper presents an all-optical, in-band optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) and chromatic dispersion monitor. We demonstrate monitoring over the 1 nm bandwidth of our signal, which is a 10 GHz pulse train of 8.8 ps pulses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

More than 200 m of germanosilica optical fiber is manufactured with an internal wire electrode running parallel to the core. In this new fabrication method the wire is integrated into the fiber during the draw process. This length of fiber is an order of magnitude longer than other previously reported fibers with internal electrodes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF