MIC: Microwave Imaging Curtain for Dynamic and Automatic Detection of Weapons and Explosive Belts.

DEXTER (detection of explosives and firearms to counter terrorism) is a project funded by NATO's Science for Peace and Security (SPS) program with the goal of developing an integrated system capable of remotely and accurately detecting explosives and firearms in public places without impeding the flow of pedestrians. While body scanner systems in secure areas of public places are becoming more and more efficient, the attack at Brussels airport on 22 March 2016, upstream of these systems, in the middle of the crowd of passengers, demonstrated the lack of discreet and real-time security against threats of mass terrorism. The NATO-SPS international and multi-year DEXTER project aims to provide new technical and strategic solutions to fill this gap.

Detection of imprecise estimations for polarization-resolved second-harmonic generation microscopy.

Second-harmonic generation microscopy can provide estimation of some local molecule distribution properties. However, in order not to get erroneous conclusions, it is important to detect measurements with insufficient precision. Such a detection technique is developed considering an approximation of the ultimate precision provided by the Cramer-Rao bound.

Precision of polarization-resolved second harmonic generation microscopy limited by photon noise for samples with cylindrical symmetry.

The estimation of parameters in polarization-resolved two-photon microscopy response perturbed by photon noise is analyzed in the context of second harmonic generation for the distribution of molecules presenting cylindrical symmetry. The estimation task is investigated using the Cramer-Rao lower bound for Poisson photon noise. It is shown that a noniterative technique can lead to estimation results that have good efficiencies for most of the physical possible values of the sample parameters for sufficiently high photon levels.

Van Cittert-Zernike theorem and symmetry properties of the normalized cross-spectral density matrix.

The van Cittert-Zernike theorem is formulated for the normalized cross-spectral density matrix of fields emitted by spatially incoherent sources. This formulation shows that sources with homogeneous polarization characteristics at second-order lead in the far field to normalized cross-spectral density matrices that possess high-symmetry properties. These symmetry properties are lost with polarization inhomogeneities of the source.

Isotropic bicomponent partially polarized and partially coherent light.

The degree of coherence of scalar light remains constant when the fields are modified by the same random linear transformation, which can be represented by the multiplication by a random complex number. This shows that the coherence properties of scalar light at order two are not modified with the increase of disorder of each field that results from these transformations. We analyze the generalization of this property to partially polarized light.