The electro-optic (EO) effect in nanodisordered potassium tantalate niobate (KTN) crystal is quantitatively investigated. It is found out that the EO coefficient of nanodisordered KTN crystal depends not only on the cooling temperature but also on the cooling rate. A larger EO coefficient can be obtained by employing a faster cooling rate. A Kerr EO efficient ($s_{11}-s_{12}=6.94\times {10}^{-14}{\mathrm{m}}^2/{\mathrm{V}}^2$) is obtained at a cooling rate of $0.45°\mathrm{C}/\mathrm{s}$. The enhanced EO efficient by employing a faster cooling rate will be greatly beneficial for a variety of applications such as laser $Q$ switches, laser pulse shaping, high-speed optical shutters, and modulating retroreflectors.

A simple and highly sensitive phase-demodulation technique is proposed, and its use for a fiber Bragg grating strain sensor is experimentally demonstrated. Sampling a phase-modulated Mach–Zehnder output with controlled time delay produced two quadrature data streams that have relative quadrature phase difference (90°). The Bragg wavelength-dependent phase information is extracted by application of digital arctangent function and phase unwrapping to the quadrature signals. By use of this technique with a reference grating, strain sensing at as much as a 30-kHz sampling rate was obtained with strain resolution of 3.5 microstrains and 6 nanostrains/ $\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$in quasi-static and dynamic strain measurements, respectively.

The unique physical effect-Kovacs effect is explored to enhance the performance of EO modulators by employing the non-thermal equilibrium state nanodisordered KTN crystals created by super-cooling process, which can have a significant 3.5 fold increase in quadratic electro-optic coefficient. This enables to reduce the switching half wave voltage (almost by half) so that a broadband (~GHz range) and large field of view (+/−30 deg) electro-optic modulator can be realized with much lowered driving power, which can be very useful for a variety of applications: laser Q-switches, laser pulse shaping, high speed optical shutters and modulating retro reflectors.

We present a multiple parameter integrated fiber sensor that can detect vector bending and ambient temperature simultaneously with a single asymmetric multimode fiber Bragg grating. Multimode Bragg gratings were fabricated in an all-silica core fiber by an infrared femtosecond laser, which showed multiple transmission dips in the transmission spectrum. Bending and ambient temperature fluctuations affect the shapes of multiple transmission dips in different ways. In bending, different dips have different sensitivities. On the other hand, temperature fluctuations tended to influence the dips uniformly across different dips. By analyzing the changing spectrum of dips, one can distinguish the changes induced by bending or temperature fluctuations. Furthermore, the high thermal stability of Bragg gratings inscribed by an infrared femtosecond laser can make this double parameter fiber sensor work in very harsh, high-temperature environments.

In this paper, we report a three orders-of-magnitude increase in the speed of a space-charge-controlled KTN beam deflector achieved by eliminating the electric field-induced phase transition (EFIPT) in a nanodisordered KTN crystal. Previously, to maximize the electro-optic effect, a KTN beam deflector was operated at a temperature slightly above the Curie temperature. The electric field could cause the KTN to undergo a phase transition from the paraelectric phase to the ferroelectric phase at this temperature, which causes the deflector to operate in the linear electro-optic regime. Since the deflection angle of the deflector is proportional to the space charge distribution but not the magnitude of the applied electric field, the scanning speed of the beam deflector is limited by the electron mobility within the KTN crystal. To overcome this speed limitation caused by the EFIPT, we propose to operate the deflector at a temperature above the critical end point. This results in a significant increase in the scanning speed from the microsecond to nanosecond regime, which represents a major technological advance in the field of fast speed beam scanners. This can be highly beneficial for many applications including high-speed imaging, broadband optical communications, and ultrafast laser display and printing.