Calibration of Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) has a crucial role for the accurate determination of fault locations and the accurate calculation of loss budget of long-haul optical fibre links during installation and repair. A comparison has been made between the Egyptian National Institute for Standards (NIS-Egypt) and the National Metrology institute of South Africa (NMISA-South Afri...

Applications of subwavelength-diameter optical fibres in nonlinear optics require precise knowledge of the submicrometre fibre waist diameter. We demonstrate a new technique for optical measurement of the diameter based on second- and third-harmonic generation with an accuracy of better than 2%. To generate the harmonic light, inter-modal phase matching must be achieved. We find that the phase-...

Broadband, mid-infrared supercontinuum generation in a step-index fluoroindate fibre is reported. By using ~70-picosecond laser pulses at 2.02 μm, provided by an optical parametric generator, a wide spectrum with a cut-off wavelength at 5.25 μm and a 5-dB bandwidth covering the entire 2-5 μm spectral interval has been demonstrated for the first time. The behaviour of the supercontinuum was inve...

We describe a VLBI experiment in which, for the first time, the clock reference is delivered from a National Metrology Institute to a radio telescope using a coherent fibre link 550 km long. The experiment consisted of a 24-hours long geodetic campaign, performed by a network of European telescopes; in one of those (Medicina, Italy) the local clock was alternated with a signal generated from an...

Studies reveal that there exists much interaction and communication between bacterial cells, with parts of these social behaviors depending on cell-cell contacts. The cell-cell contact has proved to be crucial for determining various biochemical processes. However, for cell culture with relatively low cell concentration, it is difficult to precisely control and retain the contact of a small gro...

On November 5, 1993, the City of Calgary completed the construction of the first smart prestressed concrete highway bridge built in Canada. A total of six pretensioned girders of a continuous two span skew highway bridge were prestressed using carbon fibre composite cables (CrCC) developed by Tokyo Rope, and Leadline rods produced by Mitsubishi Kasei, Japan. This paper describes the constructio...

Photothermal interferometry is an ultra-sensitive spectroscopic means for trace chemical detection in gas- and liquid-phase materials. Previous photothermal interferometry systems used free-space optics and have limitations in efficiency of light-matter interaction, size and optical alignment, and integration into photonic circuits. Here we exploit photothermal-induced phase change in a gas-fil...

Optical frequency comb sources provide thousands of precise and accurate optical lines in a single device enabling the broadband and high-speed detection required in many applications. A main challenge is to parallelize the detection over the widest possible band while bringing the resolution to the single comb-line level. Here we propose a solution based on the combination of a frequency comb ...

An analytical model for the depletion length of modulation instability in single-mode optical fibres is proposed. The model gives the possibility to determine the maximum sensing distance that distributed optical fibre sensors can reach before being limited by the pump depletion induced by modulation instability. The important role of the noise level in the evolution of both modulation instabil...

In this paper a method to track the rotating force vector set up within the air-gap of radial flux rotating electrical machines using fibre Bragg gratings is reported. The proposed technique offers the potential for simultaneous rotor speed and position monitoring. This specific sensor design, together with other FBG-based multi-parameter measurements, is aimed to create an all-optical sensor s...