International Journal of Optics

Classification of the morphology of red blood cells (RBCs) plays an extremely important role in evaluating the quality of long-term stored blood, as RBC storage lesions such as transformation of discocytes to echinocytes and then to spherocytes may cause adverse clinical effects. Most RBC segmentation and classification methods, limited by interference of staining procedures and poor details, are based on traditional bright field microscopy. In the present study, quantitative phase imaging (QPI) technology was combined with deep learning for automatic classification of RBC morphology. QPI can be used to observe unstained RBCs with high spatial resolution and phase information. In deep learning based on phase information, boundary curvature is used to reduce inadequate learning for preliminary screening of the three shapes of unstained RBCs. The model accuracy was 97.3% for the stacked sparse autoencoder plus Softmax classifier. Compared with the traditional convolutional neural network, the developed method showed a lower misclassification rate and less processing time, especially for RBCs with more discocytes. This method has potential applications in automatically evaluating the quality of long-term stored blood and real-time diagnosis of RBC-related diseases.

This paper presents a single-polarization filter based on PCF with plasmonic layers of gold and indium tin oxide (ITO). The plasmonic materials are metallic gold and ITO coated on the inner walls of two extra-large vertically arranged air holes. The resonance effect is triggered by guided modes propagating through the silica core and coupling to the coating areas. The finite element method is used to analyze the properties of the filter for the two fundamental orthogonal polarizations. A filtering effect is achieved in the communication window by optimizing the structural factors as well as gold film and ITO deposition thicknesses. When the filter is 1 mm long, the obtained filtering effect is 1319.689 dB/cm for the y-polarization and 31.881 dB/cm for the x-polarization, thus efficiently attenuating the y-component at a communication window of 1.15 μm. With a filtering bandwidth of 602 nm, the proposed filter shows superior characteristics compared with previously reported results. Applications of the proposed plasmonic PCF-based filter can be found in polarization-maintaining and polarization-suppressing systems for optical sensing and broadband transmission.

Optical circulators are used in optical devices such as multiplexers, demultiplexers, and optical routers. Usually, the magnetic material in the center of the circulator conducts light by interacting with the electromagnetic wave. In this research, a polarization-independent four-port optical waveguide circulator with the presence of a rhombus-shaped ferrimagnetic material has been designed, simulated, and optimized in the three-dimensional part of Comsol software. This designed circulator unlike the previous structures has four ports which use the transmission matrix method to conduct waves. By selecting the appropriate size and type of central ferrite, as well as the scale of input and output channels, the most optimal situation is obtained for power transmission with less than 1 dB loss when port 1 is input and port 2 is output.

We have proposed PIN array as receiver in space optical communication and adopted the double diode model, the widely accepted solar energy output theory, to study its characteristics of output current and voltage. In order to make the calculation simplified, the linear fitting method is put forward. Later, we adopt both the traditional method Newton-Raphson and the new linear fitting method to calculate the values of both maximum power and the corresponding voltage of 3 × 3 PIN array. The comparison result shows the calculated values with two methods are good consistent. It validates the feasibility of the new linear fitting method. In the next step, the experiment has been carried out. The experimental result validates the reasonability of adopting the double diode model to study PIN array. At the same time, it validates the feasibility of the new linear fitting method again.

In this paper, an athermalizing connection method of the optical components of high-performance optical objectives that enables them to reduce the deterioration of their performance due to temperature instability is proposed. The optical components of the athermalizing connection structure consist of three parts arranged from the outside to the inside. The materials of the intermediate parts are different from those of the external and internal ones. The relationship between the parameters of the athermalizing connection structure is deduced based on the mechanics of materials. The surface errors of optical components at different temperatures are simulated for an exemplary structure. The simulation results show that the root mean square (RMS) of the optical component surface is approximately proportional to the temperature. When the temperature drops by 10 °C, the RMS changes by 0.66 nm as compared to its value measured at 20 °C. The temperature deflection test of the optical components carried out in the temperature range of 20 ± 5 °C provides the RMS values of the optical face of 0.019λ at 15 °C and 0.02λ at 25 °C. The change of RMS obtained in this test amounts to 0.63 nm for a temperature difference of 10 °C, which deviates from the respective simulated value by 4%. The experimental results show that the athermalizing connection method proposed in this paper ensures small deformations of optical components at large temperature changes. Therefore, it meets the requirements for the application of optical components and is suitable for the connection of high-precision components.

In this paper, an analytical expression for describing propagation properties of twisted Gaussian Schell model array (TGSMA) beams through turbulent biological tissues is derived based on the extended Huygens Fresnel integral. With the help of the formulae, properties of the rotation and mergence for the TGSMA beams in turbulent biological tissues are researched in detail. It is found that the TGSMA beams go through the distinct mergence period in the far field besides phenomena of abruption and rotation in the near field, and turbulent biological tissues play a dominated role in mergence of the TGSMA beams. These novel results may be helpful in optical trapping.