A birefringent dual-frequency laser with a half-intracavity has been used to develop a laser Doppler velocimeter (LDV). The developed LDV utilizes a new signal-processing method based on a lock-in amplifier to achieve high-resolution velocity measurements and the discrimination of positive and negative velocities. Theoretical analysis and simulation results are presented. The velocity measurement experiments by using a high-precision linear stage are performed to verify the performance of the LDV. Compared with the previous dual-frequency LDVs, the average velocity resolution of the developed LDV is improved from 0.31 mm/s to 0.028 mm/s for a target without the rotational velocity. The measurement results show that our new technique can offer a powerful instrument for metrology sciences.
A self-mixing birefringent dual-frequency laser Doppler velocimeter (SBD-LDV) for high-resolution velocity measurements is presented in this paper. The velocity information of the object can be accurately extracted from the self-mixing Doppler frequency shift of the birefringent light-carried microwave signal. We generate a virtual stable light-carried microwave by using a birefringent dual-frequency He-Ne laser which further simplifies the structure of the light source. Moreover, the optical configuration based on the laser self-mixing interference brings benefits of compact optical setup, self-alignment, and direction discriminability. Experimentally, we extracted the Doppler beat frequency signal by the low-frequency (millihertz) phase lock-in amplifier, measured the beat frequency precisely in time-domain with a low sampling rate and calculated the magnitude of velocity. Compared with the previous self-mixing LDV, the average velocity resolution of SBD-LDV is improved to 0.030 mm/s for a target with longitudinal velocity, benefiting from the high stability of light-carried microwave. It is of great meaning and necessity because it helps to provide an available velocimeter with high stability and an extremely compact configuration, making a potential contribution to the velocimetry in practical engineering application.
Photodiodes that exhibit a two-photon absorption effect within the spectral communication band region can be useful for building an ultra-compact autocorrelator for the characteristic inspection of optical pulses. In this work, we develop an autocorrelator for measuring the temporal profile of pulses at 1550 nm from an erbium-doped fiber laser based on the two-photon photovoltaic (TPP) effect in a GaAs PIN photodiode. The temporal envelope of the autocorrelation function contains two symmetrical temporal side lobes due to the third order dispersion of the laser pulses. Moreover, the joint time-frequency distribution of the dispersive pulses and the dissimilar two-photon response spectrum of GaAs and Si result in different delays for the appearance of the temporal side lobes. Compared with Si, GaAs displays a greater sensitivity for pulse shape reconstruction at 1550 nm, benefiting from the higher signal-to-noise ratio of the side lobes and the more centralized waveform of the autocorrelation trace. We also measure the pulse width using the GaAs PIN photodiode, and the resolution of the measured full width at half maximum of the TPP autocorrelation trace is 0.89 fs, which is consistent with a conventional second-harmonic generation crystal autocorrelator. The GaAs PIN photodiode is shown to be highly suitable for real-time second-order autocorrelation measurements of femtosecond optical pulses. It is used both for the generation and detection of the autocorrelation signal, allowing the construction of a compact and inexpensive intensity autocorrelator.
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