Inserting a lossy dielectric into one arm of an interference experiment acts in many ways like a measurement. If two entangled photons are passed through the interferometer, a certain amount of information is gained about which path they took, and the interference pattern in a coincidence count measurement is suppressed. However, by inserting a second dielectric into the other arm of the interf...

We demonstrate thermally limited force spectroscopy using a probe formed by a dielectric microsphere optically trapped in water near a dielectric surface. We achieve force resolution below 1 fN in 100 s, corresponding to a 2 Å rms displacement of the probe. Our measurement combines a calibrated evanescent wave particle tracking technique and a lock-in detection method. We demonstrate the accura...

The response of a bulk dielectric to an intense few-cycle laser pulse is not solely determined by the pulse envelope, but also by ultrafast processes occurring during each optical cycle. Here, a method is presented for measuring the retardation of a probe pulse in a strong-field pumped, bulk dielectric with subcycle resolution in the pump-probe delay. Comparisons to model calculations show that...

In 1953, Ter-Mikaelian predicted that the bremsstrahlung of low energy pho-tons in a medium is suppressed because of interactions between the produced photon and the electrons in the medium. This suppression occurs because the emission takes place over on a long distance scale, allowing for destructive interference between diierent instantaneous photon emission amplitudes. We present here measu...

We present a device and method for performing vector transmission spectroscopy on biological specimens at terahertz (THz) frequencies. The device consists of artificial dielectric birefringence obtained from silicon microfluidic grating structures. The device can measure the complex dielectric function of a liquid, across a wide THz band of 2 to 5.5 THz, using a Fourier transform infrared spect...

Precise measurement of dielectric loss angle is very important for electric capacity equipment in recent power systems. When signal-to-noise is low and fundamental frequency is fluctuating, aiming at the measuring error of dielectric loss angle based on some recent Fourier transform and wavelet transform harmonics analysis method, we propose a novel algorithm based on sparse representation, and...

In this paper we describe a coaxial-circular cell for wide band dielectric measurements on solid cylindrical samples. Combined with existing data-processing algorithms, the technique can be applied to a variety of materials including oilfield rocks. The simple cylindrical sample geometry is a distinctive feature of this method and is a significant advantage of the technique. Commonly used coaxi...

Current geological extraction theory and techniques are very limited to adequately characterize the unconventional oil-gas reservoirs because of the considerable complexity of the geological structures. Optical measurement has the advantages of non-interference with the earth magnetic fields, and is often useful in detecting various physical properties. One key parameter that can be detected us...