Bragg grating etalon-based optical fiber for ultrasound and optoacoustic detection.

Fiber-based interferometers receive significant interest as they lead to miniaturization of optoacoustic and ultrasound detectors without the quadratic loss of sensitivity common to piezoelectric elements. Nevertheless, in contrast to piezoelectric crystals, current fiber-based ultrasound detectors operate with narrow ultrasound bandwidth which limits the application range and spatial resolution achieved in imaging implementations. We port the concept of silicon waveguide etalon detection to optical fibers using a sub-acoustic reflection terminator to a Bragg grating embedded etalon resonator (EER), uniquely implementing direct and forward-looking access to incoming ultrasound waves.

Interferometric optical fiber sensor for optoacoustic endomicroscopy.

Optical fiber sensors can offer robust and miniaturized detection of wideband ultrasound, yielding high sensitivity and immunity to electromagnetic interference. However, the lack of cost-effective manufacturing methods prevents the disseminated use of these sensors in biomedical applications. In this study, we developed and optimized a simple method to create optical cavities with high-quality mirrors for acoustic sensing based on micro-manipulation of UV-curable optical adhesives and electroless chemical silver deposition.

A submicrometre silicon-on-insulator resonator for ultrasound detection.

Ultrasound detectors use high-frequency sound waves to image objects and measure distances, but the resolution of these readings is limited by the physical dimensions of the detecting element. Point-like broadband ultrasound detection can greatly increase the resolution of ultrasonography and optoacoustic (photoacoustic) imaging, but current ultrasound detectors, such as those used for medical imaging, cannot be miniaturized sufficiently. Piezoelectric transducers lose sensitivity quadratically with size reduction, and optical microring resonators and Fabry-Pérot etalons cannot adequately confine light to dimensions smaller than about 50 micrometres.

All-optical optoacoustic microscope based on wideband pulse interferometry.

Optical and optoacoustic (photoacoustic) microscopy have been recently joined in hybrid implementations that resolve extended tissue contrast compared to each modality alone. Nevertheless, the application of the hybrid technique is limited by the requirement to combine an optical objective with ultrasound detection collecting signal from the same micro-volume. We present an all-optical optoacoustic microscope based on a pi-phase-shifted fiber Bragg grating (π-FBG) with coherence-restored pulsed interferometry (CRPI) used as the interrogation method.

Creating very slow optical gap solitons with a grating-assisted coupler.

We show that optical gap solitons can be produced with velocities down to 4% of the group velocity of light using a grating-assisted coupler, i.e., a fiber Bragg grating that is linearly coupled to a non-Bragg fiber over a finite domain.