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Methods for measuring variations in diffuse surfaces using electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) are widely used and well known. In this research, we present an out-of-plane ESPI system coupled to a Michelson configuration to generate simultaneous parallel interferograms with different phase shifts. The system uses circular polarization states to generate parallel phase shifted interferograms. Due to the polarization states, the fringes do not experience a contrast reduction, thus avoiding measurement errors that affect spatial or temporal phase-shifting in interferometry. The basic operating principle of polarization modulation is described, and results that represent the temporal evolution of an aluminum plate are presented. The generation of two simultaneous patterns allows one to track the dynamic performance of the plate.A static solution to dynamic aberrations for conformal aircraft windows with a large range of look angles is reported. The solution uses the inner window surface and a fixed lens array near the image plane to correct the dynamic window aberrations at different look angles. The inner window surface is first used to balance the dynamic aberrations of the full field of regard. Then a lens array is implanted in front of the image, and the dynamic aberrations are corrected by designing the surface shape and rotation direction of each lens unit in the array. The principle of the solution is discussed, and a design example shows that the solution can realize the dynamic aberration correction introduced by the conformal window with a field of regard of ±42∘. Compared to other dynamic or static correctors, this solution takes into account the large field of regard, the light weight and the stability of the optoelectronic system.Efficiency and lifetime are always problems raised with photocathodes during operation. With the purpose of obtaining high-performance GaAs photocathodes with high sensitivity and long operational lifetime, it is necessary to investigate the preparation techniques during both the cleaning and the activation procedure. By comparison with the classical preparation techniques, the improved preparation techniques with an optimized chemical etching method and activation procedure are proposed. The experimental results show that the optimized chemical etching solution is more effective in removing oxide and carbon contamination, which can help photocathodes obtain higher sensitivity. On this basis, better long wavelength response and longer operational lifetime can be obtained with the help of the more competitive activation procedure. Climbazole The proposed preparation techniques will be useful for applications as a source of spin-polarized electrons.Many optical applications that could potentially benefit from the design flexibility provided by the metasurface approach are being prohibited by the limited scalability of the fabrication and the robustness of the end-result structures when using a resonant meta-elements-based approach. An alternative demonstrated approach with superior scalability and robustness is substrate-engraved metasurfaces, based on medium mixing homogenization, yet it suffers from very limited optical response. Here we propose advancing this approach by coupling the metasurface with buried etalon layers, leading to enhancement in the optical response. A transfer matrix analysis is used to study the parameter space, predicting that the patterned reflectance values range of a beam shaper could be raised from only 4% to 30% when the metasurface is engraved in silica, and even up to 66% when engraved into higher-index oxides. Using the method proposed here, the phase difference range across the metasurface could be increased by 0.4 radians beyond the range achievable by a metasurface engraved in silica and could reach even higher values when embedded in higher-index materials. Full-wave numerical simulations are used to demonstrate a cylindrical metareflector and a metalens, further validating the analysis.Gray codes are broadly used as the cyclic codes to assist error correction in optical communications. In this paper, we have proposed the novel design of three different types of all-optical gray code converters based on the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) configuration. The XOR and OR gates are the basic devices used for the proposed design of binary to gray, binary-coded decimal (BCD) to gray, and octal to binary code converters. For the first time, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, a high data rate of 500 Gbps is achieved for the three types of all-optical code converters using the SOA-MZI configuration by exploiting an M-ary differential phase shift keying (DPSK) modulation scheme. The performance factors of the proposed all-optical code converters like extinction ratio, bit error rate, and quality factor are calculated.In this paper, a wide-spectrum orbital angular momentum (OAM) system with a polarization and optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) free-space transmission system is experimentally demonstrated. To enhance the system transmission performance in atmospheric turbulent channel, a wide-spectrum laser and an OAM beam are used. The wide-spectrum laser can be generated by utilizing pumped laser to pump nonlinear fiber, and OAM can be generated with a special light modulator. Furthermore, OTDM and polarization multiplexing methods are used to enhance the communication rate from 4 Gbit/s to 32 Gbit/s. With the use of the wide-spectrum laser and the OAM beam, the receiving scintillation index (SI) can be reduced, and detection sensitivity can be improved. It is the first time a wide-spectrum OAM communication system performance has been studied. It is shown that under weak atmospheric turbulence condition, the SI can be reduced by 38% and the receiving sensitivity can be improved by 3.18 dB via wide-spectrum OAM beams.This publisher’s note corrects the author listing in Appl. Opt.59, 7114 (2020).APOPAI0003-693510.1364/AO.397357.A new broadband tunable metamaterial absorber based on different radii of vanadium dioxide (VO2) rings loaded on the dielectric layer is designed. According to the insulator-to-metal phase transition characteristics of VO2 under thermal excitation, the dynamic adjustment of the absorption by the external temperature is achieved. The simulation results demonstrate that when VO2 is in its metal phase at high temperature, an absorption greater than 90% in the bandwidth range of 2.64-7 THz can be obtained and its relative bandwidth is reached to 90.5%. However, the absorption rate in the same frequency range is always lower than 2.3% when VO2 is in the insulator phase at low temperature, which means that the absorber can be used as a perfect reflector. The maximum tunable range of the proposed absorber can be realized from below 2.3% to nearly 100%. We further analyze and discuss the equivalent impedance and electric field distribution of the absorber and clarify the adjustment mechanism of the absorption performance of the VO2 ring.