The eye lens grows throughout life by cell accrual on its surface and can change shape to adjust the focussing power of the eye. Varying concentrations of proteins in successive cell layers create a refractive index gradient. The continued growth of the lens and age-related changes in proteins render it less able to alter shape with loss of capacity by the end of the sixth decade of life. Growt...

An optical coherence tomography system has been developed that was designed specifically for imaging the isolated crystalline lens. Cross-sectional OCT images were recorded on 40 lenses from 32 human donors with an age range of 6-82 years. A method has been developed to measure the axial thickness and average refractive index of the lens from a single recorded image. The measured average group ...

Porous silicon seems to be an appropriate material platform for the development of high-sensitivity and low-cost optical sensors, as their porous nature increases the interaction with the target substances, and their fabrication process is very simple and inexpensive. In this paper, we present the experimental development of a porous silicon microcavity sensor and its use for real-time in-flow ...

Spontaneous emission from quantum-well excitons in a thin, high-refractive-index dielectric layer embedded in a low-refractive-index bulk dielectric is studied as a function of the layer thickness and refractive-index ratio. Total spontaneous emission rates for a thin layer decrease linearly with the index ratio for dipoles in the plane of the layer and as the fifth power of the index ratio for...

Refractive index dispersion has been determined for fluorine doped fused silica containing 1 and 2% fluorine. Addition of fluorine is found to reduce the refractive index and material dispersion. Fibers modeled for minimization of modal dispersion having fused silica cores and fluorine doped silica cladding show a strong composition dependence of the optimum refractive index profile. Comparison...

The changes in the nonlinear refractive of Bradford reagent caused by its binding to bovine serum albumin (BSA) were investigated in aqueous solutions. The nonlinear refractive index at the wavelength of 514 nm was measured using Z-scan Technique. The presence of BSA shows an increase of the nonlinear refractive index coefficient over Bradford reagent alone. The nonlinear refractive index the B...

The influence of grating length and bend radius of long-period gratings (LPGs) on refractive index sensing was examined. Sensitivity to refractive indexes smaller than that of silica could be enhanced by bending LPGs. Bent LPGs lost sensitivity to refractive indexes higher than that of silica, whereas a 20-mm-long LPG arranged in a straight line had considerable sensitivity. These experimental ...

The lens, a major optical component of the eye, has a gradient refractive index, which is required to provide sufficient refractive power and image quality. The refractive index variations across the lens are dependent on the distributions and concentrations of the varying protein classes. In this study, we present the first measurements of the refractive index in the in situ eye lens from five...