Opto-Electronics Review

Finger vein biometric systems become increasingly more popular because they offer higher security comparing to other authentication solutions with respect to positive persons experience. Those systems operate on near infrared light (NIR) in wavelength range from around 700 to 1000 nm, however dedicated research to determine impact of NIR lighting on biometric system effectiveness has not been conducted and presented in the literature ever before. In this paper the study of correlation between wavelengths in NIR spectra and effectiveness of person identification in a biometric system is presented. To achieve that goal, a new model of image acquisition system allowing change of light wavelengths has been created and NIR finger vein dataset containing 11 556 images was established. Furthermore, this model was used to perform experimental work and proof that some NIR wavelengths better suit for vein patterns acquisition, allowing to increase the recognition effectiveness of finger vein biometric systems.

Widely-tunable, fully-monolithic, mid-infrared (mid-IR) deference frequency generation source (DFG) is presented. By using a custom designed fiber-pigtailed periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) crystal module the idler beam was generated with an efficiency of 21%/W, yielding 2.6 mW of optical output power. The proposed all-fiber configuration radically simplified the optical frequency conversion setup, making it robust and easily configurable. The usefulness of the constructed source was verified by performing simultaneous wavelength modulation spectroscopy (WMS) laser trace gas detection of methane, near 2999 cm⁻¹, and ethane, near 2997 cm⁻¹, via two independently generated, tunable idler beams.

In this work, two thermal- and air-stable, hole transporting materials (HTM) in perovskite solar cells are analyzed. Those obtained and investigated materials were two polyazomethines: the first one with three thiophene rings and 3,3′-dimethoxybenzidine moieties (S9) and the second one with three thiophene rings and fluorene moieties (S7). Furthermore, presented polyazomethines were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), UV–vis spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) experiments. Both polyazomethines (S7 and S9) possessed good thermal stability with a 5% weight loss at 406 and 377°C, respectively. The conductivity of S7 was two orders of magnitude higher than for S9 polymer (2.7 × 10⁻⁸ S/cm, and 2.6 × 10⁻¹⁰ S/cm, respectively). Moreover, polyazomethine S9 exhibited 31 nm bathochromic shift of the absorption band maximum compared to S7.

Obtained perovskite was investigated by UV–vis and XRD. Electrical parameters of perovskite solar cells (PSC) were investigated at Standard Test Conditions (STC). It was found that both polyazomethines protect perovskite which is confirmed by ageing test where Voc did not decrease significantly for solar cells with HTM in contrast to solar cell without hole conductor, where V_oc decrease was substantial. The best photoconversion efficiency (PCE = 6.9%), among two investigated in this work polyazomethines, was obtained for device with the following architectures FTO/TiO₂/TiO₂ + perovskite/S7/Au. Stability test proved the procreative effects of polyazomethines on perovskite absorber.

An optimal design of a slot waveguide is presented for realizing an ultrafast optical modulator based on a 220 nm silicon wafer technology. The recipe is to maximize the confinement and interaction between optical power supported by the waveguide and electric field applied through metallic electrodes. As height of waveguide is fixed at 220 nm, the waveguide and slot width are optimized to maximize the confinement factor of optical power. Moreover, metal electrodes tend to make the waveguide lossy, their optimal placement is calculated to reduce the optical loss and enhance the voltage per unit width in the slot. Performance of an optimally designed slot waveguide with metal electrodes as ultrafast modulator is also discussed.

In this work, an electrically tunable long-period fiber grating (LPFG) coated with liquid crystal layer (LC) is presented. As a LC layer, a prototype low-birefringence 1550A LC mixture was chosen. As a LPFG host, two types of gratings were studied: the LPFGs based on a standard telecommunication fiber, produced by an electric arc technique with a period of 222 μm, and the LPFGs based on a boron co-doped fiber written by a UV technique with a period of 226.8 μm. The relatively short period of these gratings allowed exploiting unique sensing properties of the attenuation bands associated with modes close to the turn-around point. Experiments carried out showed that for the UV-induced LPFG with a LC layer, on the powered state the attenuation band could be offset from the attenuation band measured in the unpowered state by almost 130 nm. When the arc-induced LPFG was coated with the LC, the depth of the attenuation band could be efficiently controlled by applying an external E-field. Additionally, all experimental results obtained in this work were supported by the theoretical analysis based on a model developed with Optigrating v.4.2 software.

Using Langmuir and Langmuir-Blodgett techniques molecular films of chlorinated perylene derivatives, namely tetra-n-butyl-1,6,7,12-tetrachloroperylene-3,4,9,10-tetracarboxylate (PCn for n = 1, 5, 9) have been studied. The Langmuir films of pure compounds and mixed with liquid crystalline 4-octyl-4′-cyanobiphenyl (8CB) were characterized by surface pressure-mean molecular area isotherms. An additive rule reveals miscibility of all the dyes with 8CB but shows different types of intermolecular interaction forces. The pure and mixed Langmuir films were transferred onto quartz plates and characterized spectroscopically. Absorption and fluorescence spectra were recorded for the samples in form of diluted chloroform solution, the dye with 8CB mixtures in monomolecular Langmuir-Blodgett films and in liquid crystal cells. Different tendency to aggregation of the dye with short and long alkyl chains was observed. It is shown that the dye molecule stacking and aggregation of the chlorinated perylene dyes depend on the dye concentration and are related to the torsion of the perylene core.

The main problem in theoretical analysis of structures with strong confinement is the fact that standard mathematical tools: differential equations and Fourier’s transformations are no longer applicable. In this paper we have demonstrated that the method of Green’s functions can be successfully used on low-dimension crystal samples, as a consequence of quantum size effects. We can illustrate a modified model through the prime cubic structure molecular crystal: bulk and ultrathin film. Our analysis starts with standard exciton Hamiltonian with definition of commutative Green's function and equation of motion. We have presented a detailed procedure of calculations of Green's functions, and further dispersion law, distribution of states and relative permittivity for bulk samples. After this, we have followed the same procedures for obtaining the properties of excitons in ultra-thin films. The results have been presented graphically. Besides the modified method of Green’s functions we have shown that the exciton energy spectrum is discrete in film structures (with a number of energy levels equal to the number of atomic planes of the film). Compared to the bulk structures, with a continual absorption zone, in film structures exist resonant absorption peaks. With increased film thickness differences between bulk and film vanish.

We are presenting a new low-cost Single Sideband (SSB) modulated Radio-over Fiber (RoF) communication system for millimeter (mm)-wave multiband wireless communication at the frequencies of 40 GHz, 80 GHz and 120 GHz. Its principle lies in the Carrier Suppressed modulation through a nested dual electrode Mach–Zehnder Modulator (MZM) and product modulator based baseband signal decomposition. In this novel method, the optical signal is decomposed into different SSB signals using a power splitter and product modulators at the base station. This proposed method uses a different technique for a baseband signal decomposition from the existing method. The proposed signal decomposition technique has reduced the nonlinearities due to the FBGs. The proposed method is compared with the existing method in terms of BER, data rate and OSNR. The simulation results disclose that our proposed scheme outperforms the existing methods at a higher data rate of 80 Gbps with a minimum BER and privileged Q factor.

A metamaterial absorber (MA) based sensor is designed and analysed for various important applications including pressure, temperature, density, and humidity sensing. Material parameters, as well as equivalent circuit model have been extracted and explained. After obtaining a perfect absorption (PA) at around 6.46 GHz and 7.68 GHz, surface current distributions at resonance points have been explained. Since bandwidth and applicability to different sensor applications are important for metamaterial sensor applications, we have realized distinctive sensor demonstrations for pressure, temperature, moisture content and density and the obtained results have been compared with the current literature. The proposed structure uses the changes on the overall system resonance frequency which is caused by the sensor layer’s dielectric constant that varies depending on the electromagnetic behaviour of the sample placed in. This model can be adapted to be used in sensor applications including industrial, medical and agricultural products.

This paper introduces a new comprehensive procedure for both geometric and colour calibration of structured light system. In order to perform both geometric and colour calibration procedure, a new calibration artifact is proposed. The intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of projector and camera are estimated by using an extended pinhole camera model with a tangential and radial distortion. Camera image plane coordinates are obtained by extracting features from images of a calibration artifact. Projector image plane coordinates are calculated on the basis of continuous phase maps obtained from a fringe pattern phase reconstruction procedure. In order to stereo calibrate camera-projector system, pairs of corresponding image plane points are calculated with subpixel accuracy. In addition, one of three pattern views is used in colour calibration. RGB values of a colour field pattern detected by camera and their reference values are compared. This comparison leads to derivation of a colour transformation matrix. The performance of the proposed method is tested by measuring plane, sphere and distance reference. Also 360 degrees complex object 3D model from a set of measurements is obtained. Residual mean errors for all tests performed are calculated.