The design, fabrication and characterization of a miniature adjustable-focus endoscope are reported. Such an endoscope consists of a solid tunable lens for optical power tuning, two slender piezoelectric benders for laterally moving the lens elements perpendicular to the optical axis, and an image fiber bundle for image transmission. Both optical and mechanical designs are presented in this paper. Dynamic tuning of optical powers from about 135 diopters to about 205 diopters is experimentally achieved from the solid tunable lens, which contains two freeform surfaces governed by 6-degree polynomials and optimized by ray tracing studies. Results show that there is no obvious distortion or blurring in the images obtained, and the recorded resolution of the lens reaches about 30 line pairs per mm. Three test targets located at various object distances of 20 mm, 50 mm and 150 mm are focused individually by the endoscope by applying different driving DC voltages to demonstrate its adjustable-focus capability.

We investigate the inter-mode nonlinear interaction in the multi-mode optomechanical nano-oscillator which consists of coupled silicon nanocantilevers, where the integrated photonic crystal nanocavities provide the coupling between the optical and mechanical modes. Due to the self-saturation and cross-saturation of the mechanical gain, the inter-mode competition is observed, which leads to the bistable operation of the optomechanical nano-oscillator: only one of the mechanical modes can oscillate at any one time, and the oscillation of one mode extremely suppresses that of the other with a side mode suppression ratio (SMSR) up to 40 dB. In the meantime, mode hopping, i.e., the optomechanical oscillation switches from one mode to the other, is also observed and found to be able to be provoked by excitation laser fluctuations.

This paper presents the design, simulation, fabrication, assembly, and testing of a miniature thermo-pneumatic optofluidic lens. The device comprises two separate zones for air heating and fluid pressing on a flexible membrane. A buried three-dimensional spiral microchannel connects the two zones without pumps or valves. The three-dimensional microfluidic structure is realized using a high-resolution three-dimensional printing technique. Multi-physics finite element simulations are introduced to assess the optimized air chamber design and the low-temperature gradient of the optical liquid. The tunable lens can be operated using a direct-current power supply. The temperature change with time is measured using an infrared thermal imager. The focal length ranges from 5 to 23 mm under a maximum voltage of 6 V. Because of the small size and robust actuation scheme, the device can potentially be integrated into miniature micro-optics devices for the fine-tuning of focal lengths.

In this paper, a new tuning strategy is proposed by incorporating a pneumatically actuated metamaterial to achieve on-demand polarization manipulation at THz frequencies. Through controlling the actuation pressure, the device function can be flexibly switched among three types of polarization conversion capabilities within the same operation frequency band, from 1.3 THz to 1.5 THz, in which the mutual conversion between linear polarization and circular polarization, such as a quarter-wave plate, and handedness inversion between circular polarizations as a helicity inverter as well as a helicity keeper, have been successfully achieved between the incidence and reflection. Moreover, the intrinsic tuning mechanism for the polarization manipulation is also discussed.

The absence of natural sources of circularly polarized light has created a critical demand for high-performance polarization converters in emerging technologies such as quantum information processing, biomedical diagnostics, and advanced magneto-optical recording systems. Despite significant efforts, linear-to-circular polarization converters that combine high efficiency with tunability remain scarce. In this paper, we present a multifunctional and tunable device with 99.9% efficiency for converting linear to circular polarization in the telecom wavelength range. It can also function as a phase-only compensator with a controllable phase range of 1.93$\pi$ while maintaining a reflectance above 99%. The angular sensitivity analysis indicates that the device can tolerate incidence angles ranging from 8 to 10.4 degrees. This high-efficiency polarization conversion device offers significant advantages in integrated optics due to its multifunctionality and tunability and has promising applications in optical phased-array radars and quantum communication.

Existing interferometric fibre-optic hydrophones have some common challenges in detecting high-frequency underwater acoustic signals. First, to obtain acoustic sensitivity that meets the requirements for detection in practical applications, long arms of the M-Z interferometer are desired, which in turn requires the width of the fibre-winding area to be increased. However, when the lateral size of the hydrophone probe is too large, it no longer fits in the high-frequency signal detection. Second, to meet the practical requirements of sensitivity, the air cavity, which serves as the sensitisation structure of the hydrophone, needs to be slender to increase the fibre-winding area. This may lead to a lower natural resonance frequency and, therefore, result in the poor high-frequency performance of the probe. These problems hinder the expansion of the response frequency of fibre-optic hydrophones. Herein, we propose a small-size interference high-frequency optical-fibre hydrophone based on a folded air cavity. This structure turns the traditional thin air cavity into a folding multi-layer cavity, greatly reducing the length of the two arms of the interferometer and the transverse dimension of the fibre-optic hydrophone without reducing the fibre-winding area. The high-frequency applied performance of the hydrophone is improved as well. The sensor-sensitive and supporting structures of the hydrophone were optimised by finite element analysis. With the folded air cavity structure, a high-frequency fibre-optic hydrophone with dimensions less than Φ20 mm×20 mm was realised. Experimental results show that the high-frequency fibre-optic hydrophone based on the Michelson interferometer has an acoustic sensitivity of about -140dB in the range of 20Hz-20kHz, and the fluctuation of the sound-pressure sensitivity is better than ±1.5 dB, which satisfies the requirements of high-frequency underwater acoustic signal detection.