Experimental Study and Analysis of Light Scattering Patterns of Bragg Fibers Fabricated in PECVD

Light scattering patterns are commonly used in industry to assess fiber quality. In this work, scattering patterns of Bragg fibers are studied. Optical fibers are coated with alternating layers of Silicon Nitride and Silica using Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition. A laser beam incident perpendicular to the fiber axis scatters off creating patterns distinct from that of uncoated fibers which exhibit continuous front lobe. Effect of variation in layer properties, polarization, wavelength and fiber symmetry is observed in the patterns. Anomalous suppression and enhancement in angular scattering pattern is explained through a scattering angle diagram. Features in the pattern are mapped to reflectance of the Bragg stack and it is found that a stopband creates the anomalous features in the scattering.

Computational Performance of GTD-RT Applied for Evaluation of Electromagnetic Scattering on Rough Surfaces

In this paper, a new robust computational method that applies the geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD) in conjunction with the ray tracing (RT) technique is developed to evaluate the electromagnetic scattering pattern due to a plane wave represented as beam of parallel rays incident on a rough surface of quite arbitrary statistical parameters. The development of the proposed technique is explained in detail taking into consideration the generation of the geometrical model of the rough surface. The Fresnel reflection model is applied under the assumption of arbitrary electrical and optical properties of the rough surface material. Also the polarization of the plane wave primarily incident on the rough surface is taken into consideration. The algorithm developed in the present work accounts for multiple bounces of an incident ray and, hence, it can be considered arbitrary higher-order GTD-RT technique. The accuracy of the obtained results is verified through the comparison with the experimental measurements of the scattering pattern of a light beam incident on rough sheets with specific statistical properties. The numerical results of the present work are concerned with investigating the dependence of the scattering pattern on the surface roughness, refractive index, angle of incidence, and the resolution of the geometric model of the rough surface. Also, it is shown that, for limited resolution of the rough surface model, the accuracy of the calculated scattered field depends on the angle of incidence of the primary beam and the surface roughness.

ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENT POLARIMETRIC DECOMPOSITION TECHNIQUES USING COMPACT POLARIMETRIC NISAR DATA FOR AHMEDABAD, INDIA

The present study addresses the potential of airborne NASA – ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) compact polarimetric (CP) data to discriminate the land cover classes emphasizing the urban area for parts of Ahmedabad city, India. This has been carried out by generating m-Delta, m-Chi and m-Alpha polarimetric decompositions using Compact Polarimetric L band NISAR data. In Hybrid Polarimetric data, both m-delta and m-chi decompositions have almost the same formulations, indicating that delta and chi play the same roles as indicators of single-bounce and double-bounce scattering. However, M-delta seem preferable over M-chi as stoke parameter delta is highly susceptible towards orientation. It is also observed that building orientation and density has effect on scattering pattern. This is attributed to the target orientation which is parallel to the look direction of the sensor. Supervised classification of m-Delta decomposition was carried out and over all accuracy of 81.1 % was observed in the study.

Localizing nanoscale objects using nanophotonic near-field transducers

We study how nanophotonic structures can be used for determining the position of a nearby nanoscale object with subwavelength accuracy. Through perturbing the near-field environment of a metasurface transducer consisting of nano-apertures in a metallic film, the location of the nanoscale object is transduced into the transducer’s far-field optical response. By monitoring the scattering pattern of the nanophotonic near-field transducer and comparing it to measured reference data, we demonstrate the two-dimensional localization of the object accurate to 24 nm across an area of 2 × 2 μm. We find that adding complexity to the nanophotonic transducer allows localization over a larger area while maintaining resolution, as it enables encoding more information on the position of the object in the transducer’s far-field response.

A stalk fluid forming above the transition from the lamellar to the rhombohedral phase of lipid membranes

In this work, we present evidence for the formation of transient stalks in aligned multilamellar stacks of lipid membranes. Just above the phase transition from the fluid ($$L_\alpha$$ L α ) lamellar phase to the rhombohedral phase (R), where lipid stalks crystallize on a super-lattice within the lipid bilayer stack, we observe a characteristic scattering pattern, which can be attributed to a correlated fluid of transient stalks. Excess (off-axis) diffuse scattering with a broad modulation around the position which later transforms to a sharp peak of the rhombohedral lattice, gives evidence for the stalk fluid forming as a pre-critical effect, reminiscent of critical phenomena in the vicinity of second-order phase transitions. Using high-resolution off-specular X-ray scattering and lineshape analysis we show that this pre-critical regime is accompanied by an anomalous elasticity behavior of the membrane stack, in particular an increase in inter-bilayer compressibility, i.e., a decrease in the compression modulus.