A quick look at publications from 2019-20 so far…. First, for work done entirely or mostly at Carleton:
Fu Liu’s PhD thesis deals with all optical dynamic effects obtained by putting active coatings on the cladding surface of tilted FBGs. His first paper in APL Photonics describes GHz rate all optical modulation of a CW probe at one wavelength by a pump beam at another wavelength, both co-propagating in the same single mode fiber: 40 GHz-rate all-optical cross-modulation of core-guided near infrared light in single mode fiber by surface plasmons on gold-coated tilted fiber Bragg gratings . Another one in Annalen der Physik (Berlin) shows that a 6 nm thick graphene coating on the cladding surface of a TFBG causes a self-starting, self-sustained modulation of a CW light signal propagating in the fiber core due to a bistable process:Saturable Absorption and Bistable Switching of Single Mode Fiber Core-Guided Light by a 6 nm-thick , Few Layers Graphene Coating on the Cladding Surface .
Then, a highly multidisciplinary team from Carleton’s Electronics, Chemistry, and Biochemistry departments, with collaborators from Spartan Bioscience, developed a TFBG-based device to control and detect DNA melting in spots deposited on the surface of an optical fiber: Self-heating tilted fiber Bragg grating device for melt curve analysis of solid-phase DNA hybridization and thermal cycling was published in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry. Congratulations students and postdoc Jason Koppert, Devin O’Neill and Hubert Jean-Ruel for this excellent work.
Finally, Hannah Dinovitzer and Albane Laronche published an exhaustive study of FBG packaging designs and tests for high impact sudden forces (kiloNewton levels at millisecond durations) in the IEEE Sensors Journal: Fiber Bragg Grating High Impact Force Sensors with Adjustable Sensitivity and Dynamic Range;
and Osama Al-Mai, a Mechanical Engineering student PhD student co-supervised by Professor Mojtaba Ahmadi published his work on FBGs for a 6-axis sensor designed to help in the rehabilitation of people with walking disabilities (also in the IEEE Sensors Journal): Development and Characterization of Compliant FBG-Based, Shear and Normal Force Sensing Elements for Biomechanical Applications
We also had very fruitful collaborations with external partners for work carried out jointly between our lab and their institutions:
Médéric Loyez, a visiting student from Christophe Caucheteur’s and Rudy Wattiez’s groups at the Université de Mons (Belgium) came to our lab to perform biochemical sensing experiments with TFBGs covered with aptamers (from Maria DeRosa’s LADDER lab ) and cells (from the Willmore Lab). The results are published in ACS Sensors: Rapid Detection of Circulating Breast Cancer Cells Using a Multiresonant Optical Fiber Aptasensor with Plasmonic Amplification.
Professor François Ouellette, one of the pioneers in FBG technology, is now a professor at Chengdu University in China and we are collaborating with his team to develop a low cost, extremely accurate interrogation system for FBGs, and in particular for TFBGs,with results published in Optics Express: High resolution interrogation of tilted fiber Bragg gratings using an extended range dual wavelength differential detection.