Optical gas sensing attracts growing attention in the recent years. This is governed by progressive availability of optical nanostructures fabrication and complex techniques of optical spectrum processing. In the present paper, a room-temperature optical humidity sensor based on a hydrophilic polymer Nafion is theoretically and experimentally investigated. Sensor geometry is optimized for maximum sensitivity of an angle-resolved ATR dip in the Kretschmann configuration. The reflectance dip is attributed to the 2nd order Nafion layer leaky waveguide mode hybridized with the surface plasmon-polariton at the silver/Nafion interface. Results of the relative humidity (RH) retrieval with the regression of the physical model parameters is compared to these obtained with different machine learning (ML) techniques. It is shown that a limited raw data set is enough for using ML algorithms. Accuracy of 0.3% has been demonstrated in RH measurements.

Frequency-angular characteristics of signal and idler photons generated under spontaneous parametric down-conversion are studied in a strongly frequency nondegenerate regime, without paraxial approximation, accounting for possible inherent absorption of idler waves in a nonlinear crystal, classical thermal field fluctuations, and the multimode character of parametric interaction induced by transverse spatial limitation of the pump beam. Spatial limitation is shown to lead to a huge increase in angular divergence of the idler photons generated at terahertz frequencies. General expressions are obtained for the frequency-angular sensitivity function of the nonlinear-optical terahertz wave detector and for power densities of the signal and idler photon fluxes. The absorption-induced difference in the parametric conversion coefficients for the noise and externally incident radiation of the idler frequency is shown to be described by approximately the same loss factor for all active spatial idler modes. Two different parametric contributions of the internal thermal noise to the number of output idler photons were revealed with different dependence on the idler-wave absorption. Expressions for the loss factors, which describe absorption-induced effects in signal and idler channels, are obtained and shown to be turning into one another by changing the sign of the absorption coefficient. Relative contribution of thermal and quantum field fluctuations into the intrinsic radiation of a nonlinear crystal at signal and idler frequencies is analyzed accounting for the crystal absorption properties.

We study parametric down-conversion (PDC) of optical laser radiation in the strongly frequency non-degenerate regime which is promising for the generation of quantum-correlated pairs of extremely different spectral ranges, the optical and the terahertz (THz) ones. The possibility to detect tenuous THz-frequency photon fluxes generated under low-gain spontaneous PDC is demonstrated using a hot electron bolometer. Then experimental dependences of the THz radiation power on the detection angle and on the pump intensity are analyzed.

We study a calibration scheme for terahertz wave nonlinear-optical detectors based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Contrary to the usual low wavelength pump in the green, we report here on the observation of spontaneous parametric down-conversion originating from an in-growth poled lithium niobate crystal pumped with a continuous wave 50 mW, 795 nm diode laser system, phase-matched to a terahertz frequency idler wave. Such a system is more compact and allows for longer poling periods as well as lower losses in the crystal. Filtering the pump radiation by a rubidium-87 vapor cell allowed the frequency-angular spectra to be obtained down to ∼0.5 THz or ∼1 nm shift from the pump radiation line. The presence of an amplified spontaneous emission “pedestal” in the diode laser radiation spectrum significantly hampers the observation of spontaneous parametric down-conversion spectra, in contrast to conventional narrowband gas lasers. Benefits of switching to longer pump wavelengths are pointed out, such as collinear optical-terahertz phase-matching in bulk crystals.

The spectrum and waveforms of broadband terahertz-radiation pulses generated by low-temperature In_0.53Ga_0.47As epitaxial films under femtosecond laser pumping are investigated by terahertz time-resolved spectroscopy. The In_0.53Ga_0.47As films are fabricated by molecular-beam epitaxy at a temperature of 200°C under different arsenic pressures on (100)-oriented InP substrates and, for the first time, on (411)A InP substrates. The surface morphology of the samples is studied by atomic-force microscopy and the structural quality is established by high-resolution X-ray diffraction analysis. It is found that the amplitude of terahertz radiation from the LT-InGaAs layers on the (411)A InP substrates exceeds that from similar layers formed on the (100) InP substrates by a factor of 3–5.