Quantifying the structural dynamics of complex media is challenging because of the multiple temporal and spatial scales involved. Thanks to the ability to retrieve collective dynamics noninvasively, light scattering-based approaches are often the methods of choice. This dissertation discusses specific features of dynamic light scattering that utilizes spatio-temporal coherence gating. It is demonstrated that this optical fiber-based approach can operate over a large range of optical regimes and it has a number of unique capabilities such as an effective isolation of single scattering, a large sensitivity, and a high collection efficiency. Moreover, the approach also provides means for proper ensemble averaging, which is necessary when characterizing multi-scale dynamics. A number of applications are reviewed in which these specific characteristics permit recovering dynamic information of complex fluids beyond the capabilities of traditional light scattering-based techniques.

Quantum Cascade Lasers are a novel source of coherent infrared light, unique in their tunability over the mid-infrared and terahertz range of frequencies. Advances in bandgap engineering and semiconductor processing techniques in recent years have led to the development of highly efficient quantum cascade lasers capable of room temperature operation. Recent work has demonstrated power scaling with broad area quantum cascade lasers by increasing active region width beyond the standard ~10 ?m. Taking into account thermal effects caused by driving a device with electrical power, an experimentally fitted model is developed to predict the optical power output in both pulsed and continuous operation with varying device geometry and minor changes to quantum cascade laser active region design. The effects of the characteristic temperatures of threshold current density and slope efficiency, active region geometry, and doping, on output power are studied in the model. The model is then used to refine the active region design for increased power out in continuous operation for a broad area design. Upon testing the new design, new thermal effects on rollover current density are observed. The model is then refined to reflect the new findings and more accurately predict output power characteristics.

Light-matter interaction is a pivotal effect that involves the synergetic interplay of electromag- netic fields with fundamental particles. In this regard localized surface plasmons (LSP) arise from coherent interaction of the electromagnetic field with the collective oscillation of free electrons in confined sub-wavelength environments. Their most attractive properties are strong field en- hancements at the near field, highly inhomogeneous, peculiar temporal and spatial distributions and unique polarization properties. LSP systems also offer a unique playground for fundamental electromagnetic physics where micro-scale systemic properties can be studied in the macro-scale. These important properties and opportunities are brought up in this work where I study hybrid cavity-coupled plasmonic systems in which the weak plasmonic element is far-field coupled with the photonic cavity by properly tuning its phase. In this work I preset the fundamental understand- ing of such a complex systems from the multi-resonance interaction picture along experimental demonstration. Using this platform and its intricate near fields I further demonstrate a novel mech- anism to generate superchiral light: a field polarization property that adds a degree of freedom to light-matter interactions at the nanoscale exploited in advanced sensing applications and surface effect processes. Finally, the detection of non-chiral analytes, such as proteins, neurotransmit- ters or nanoparticles, and more complex chiral analytes, such as proteins and its conformation states, amino acids or chiral molecules at low concentrations is demonstrated in several biosensing applications. The accompanied experiential demonstrations were accomplished using the nanoim- printing technique, which places the cavity-coupled hybrid plasmonic system as a unique platform towards realistic applications not limited by expensive lithographic techniques.

Multimode optical fibers have recently reemerged as a viable platform for addressing a number of long-standing issues associated with information bandwidth requirements and power-handling capabilities. The complex nature of heavily multimoded systems can be effectively exploited to observe altogether novel physical effects arising from spatiotemporal and intermodal linear and nonlinear processes. Here, we have studied nonlinear dynamics in multimode optical fibers (MMFs) in both the normal and anomalous dispersion regimes. In the anomalous dispersion regime, the nonlinearity leads to a formation of spatiotemporal 3-D solitons. Unlike in single-mode fibers, these solitons are not unique and their properties can be modified through the additional degrees of freedom offered by these multimoded settings. In addition, soliton related processes such as soliton fission and dispersive wave generation will be also drastically altered in such multimode systems. Our theoretical work unravels some of the complexities of the underlying dynamics and helps us better understand these effects. The nonlinear dynamics in such multimode systems can be accelerated through a judicious fiber design. A cancelation of Raman self-frequency shifts and Blue-shifting multimode solitons were observed in such settings as a result of an acceleration of intermodal oscillations. Spatiotemporal instabilities in parabolic-index multimode fibers will also be discussed. In the normal dispersion regime, this effect can be exploited to generate an ultrabroad and uniform supercontinuum that extends more than 2.5 octaves. To do so, the unstable spectral regions are pushed away from the pump, thus sweeping the entire spectrum. Multimode parabolic pulses were also predicted and observed in passive normally dispersive tapered MMFs. These setting can obviate the harsh bandwidth limitation present in single-mode system imposed by gain medium and be effectively used for realizing high power multimode fiber lasers. Finally, an instant and efficient second-harmonic generation was observed in the multimode optical fibers. Through a modification of initial conditions, the efficiency of this process could be enhanced to a record high of %6.5.

Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCLs) are semiconductor devices that, currently, have been observed to emit radiation from ~ 2.6 μm to 250 μm (1 to 100 terahertz range of frequencies.) They have established themselves as the laser of choice for spectroscopic gas sensing in the mid-wavelength infrared (3-8 μm) and long-wavelength infrared (8-15 μm) region. In the 4-12 μm wavelength region, the highest performing QCL devices, in terms of wall-plug efficiency and continuous wave operation, are indium phosphide (InP) based. The ultimate goal is to incorporate this InP-based QCL technology to silicon (Si) substrate since most opto-electronics are Si-based. The main building blocks required for practical QCL-on-Si integrated platforms will be covered in this work. InP is lattice-mismatched to gallium arsenide (GaAs), even though both are III-V compound semiconductor materials. The first room temperature operation of QCL grown on a lattice-mismatched GaAs substrate with metamorphic buffer (M-buffer) is discussed in this thesis. The QCL structure’s strain-balanced active region was made up of 40-stages of alternating barriers (Al0.78In0.22As) and wells (In0.73Ga0.27As) and an all-InP, 8 μm-thick waveguide. A small sample of 2 cm2 size was taken from a 6-inch wafer and processed into ridge-waveguide chips 3 mm x 30 μm in size. Lateral current injection scheme was utilized due to an insulating M-buffer layer. Preliminary reliability testing up to 200 minutes of runtime showed no sign of power degradation. Laser chips with high reflection (HR) coating showed optical power over 200 mW of total peak power at cryogenic temperature (78 K), with lasing seen up to 230 K. In this temperature range, the measured characteristic temperatures of T0 ≈ 460 K and T1 ≈ 210 K describes the temperature dependence for threshold current and slope efficiency. Adding a partial HR coating (56%) on the front facet extended the lasing range above room temperature (303 K). This thesis will also discuss the preliminary cryogenic temperature result of the first InP-based QCL grown on lattice-mismatched silicon (Si) substrate.

See-through augmented reality and virtual reality displays are emerging due to their widespread applications in education, engineering design, medical, retail, transportation, automotive, aerospace, gaming, and entertainment. For augmented reality and virtual reality displays, high-resolution density, high luminance, fast response time and high ambient contrast ratio are critically needed. High-resolution density helps eliminate the screen-door effect, high luminance and fast response time enable low duty ratio operation, which plays a key role for suppressing image blurs. A dimmer placed in front of AR display helps to control the incident background light, which in turn improves the image contrast. In this dissertation, we have focused three crucial display metrics: high luminance, fast motion picture response time (MPRT) and high ambient contrast ratio. We report a fringe-field switching liquid crystal display, abbreviated as d-FFS LCD, by using a low viscosity material and new diamond-shape electrode configuration. Our proposed device shows high transmittance, fast motion picture response time, low operation voltage, wide viewing angle, and indistinguishable color shift and gamma shift. We also investigate the rubbing angle effects on transmittance and response time. When rubbing angle is 0 degree, the virtual wall effect is strong, resulting in fast response time but compromised transmittance. When rubbing angle is greater than 1.2 degree, the virtual walls disappear, as a result, the transmittance increases dramatically, but the tradeoff is in slower response time. We also demonstrate a photo-responsive guest-host liquid crystal (LC) dimmer to enhance the ambient contrast ratio in augmented reality displays. The LC composition consists of photo-stable chiral agent, photosensitive azobenzene, and dichroic dye in a nematic host with negative dielectric anisotropy. In this device, transmittance changes from bright state to dark state by exposing a low intensity UV or blue light. Reversal process can be carried out by red light or thermal effect. Such a polarizer-free photo-activated dimmer can also be used for wide range of applications, such as diffractive photonic devices, portable information system, vehicular head-up displays, and smart window for energy saving purpose. A dual-stimuli polarizer-free dye-doped liquid crystal (LC) device is demonstrated as a dimmer. Upon UV/blue light exposure, the LC directors and dye molecules turn from initially vertical alignment (high transmittance state) to twisted fingerprint structure (low transmittance state). The reversal process is accelerated by combining a longitudinal electric field to unwind the LC directors from twisted fingerprint to homeotropic state, and a red light to transform the cis azobenzene back to trans. Such an electric-field-assisted reversal time can be reduced from ~10s to a few milliseconds, depending on the applied voltage. Considering power consumption, low manufacturing cost, and large fabrication tolerance, this device can be used as a smart dimmer to enhance the ambient contrast ratio for augmented reality displays.

The fiber-optic imaging system enables imaging deeply into hollow tissue tracts or organs of biological objects in a minimally invasive way, which are inaccessible to conventional microscopy. It is the key technology to visualize biological objects in biomedical research and clinical applications. The fiber-optic imaging system should be able to deliver a high-quality image to resolve the details of cell morphology in vivo and in real time with a miniaturized imaging unit. It also has to be insensitive to environmental perturbations, such as mechanical bending or temperature variations. Besides, both coherent and incoherent light sources should be compatible with the imaging system. It is extremely challenging for current technologies to address all these issues simultaneously. The limitation mainly lies in the deficient stability and imaging capability of fiber-optic devices and the limited image reconstruction capability of algorithms. To address these limitations, we first develop the randomly disordered glass-air optical fiber featuring a high air-filling fraction (~28.5 %) and low loss (~1 dB per meter) at visible wavelengths. Due to the transverse Anderson localization effect, the randomly disordered structure can support thousands of modes, most of which demonstrate single-mode properties. By making use of these modes, the randomly disordered optical fiber provides a robust and low-loss imaging system which can transport images with higher quality than the best commercially available imaging fiber. We further demonstrate that deep-learning algorithm can be applied to the randomly disordered optical fiber to overcome the physical limitation of the fiber itself. At the initial stage, a laser-illuminated system is built by integrating a deep convolutional neural network with the randomly disordered optical fiber. Binary sparse objects, such as handwritten numbers and English letters, are collected, transported and reconstructed using this system. It is proved that this first deep-learning-based fiber imaging system can perform artifact-free, lensless and bending-independent imaging at variable working distances. In real-world applications, the gray-scale biological subjects have much more complicated features. To image biological tissues, we re-design the architecture of the deep convolutional neural network and apply it to a newly designed system using incoherent illumination. The improved fiber imaging system has much higher resolution and faster reconstruction speed. We show that this new system can perform video-rate, artifact-free, lensless cell imaging. The cell imaging process is also remarkably robust with regard to mechanical bending and temperature variations. In addition, this system demonstrates stronger transfer-learning capability than existed deep-learning-based fiber imaging system.

Quantum dot light-emitting diodes (QLEDs) have attracted intense attention since their inception due to their unique properties, such as tunable emitting wavelengths, saturated color and facile solution processability. Although the past decades have witnessed tremendous progress of QLEDs development as one of the most promising candidates for next-generation display technology, QLEDs remains to be outshined by state-of-the-art organic light-emitting diode (OLED) in efficiency, peak brightness and device lifetime. In this dissertation, we report that by employing a novel mixture of ZnO nanoparticles and Cs2CO3 as electron injection layer, hybrid and all-solution processed inverted QLEDs with ultra-high luminance, high current efficiency and low efficiency roll off can be realized. The devices surpass state-of-the-art OLEDs in terms of the peak luminance and electroluminescence efficiencies at high current densities. With the additional benefits of solution processability, low power consumption, and the structural compatibility with n-type transistor backplanes, these results are indicative of QLEDs' great potential for next-generation display. Beyond the application in display, other novel applications, which can take advantage of the unique features of these ultrabright red QLEDs without worrying about their relatively short lifetime, were also explored. We demonstrated, for the first time, that QLEDs can be promising light sources for various photomedical applications, including photodynamic therapy (PDT) cancer cell treatment and photobiomodulation (PBM) cell metabolism enhancement. The work promises to generate flexible QLED-based light sources that could enable the widespread use and clinical acceptance of photomedical strategies including PDT and PBM for the betterment of mankind. In addition, a hybrid white OLED design incorporating red quantum dot emitter is proposed and analyzed for high-performance solid-state lighting. Moreover, theoretical analysis shows the high potential of our ultra-bright QLED as light sources for high-performance optical sensors. The analysis paved the way for further developments of QLED-based technologies.

Acousto-Optic Deflectors (AODs) are inertialess optical solid state devices that have advantages over conventional mechanically controlled mirror-based deflectors in numerous scientific and industrial applications. These applications include fluorescence microscopy, sensing, variable-focus lens, photolithography and laser materials processing. AODs are currently operated with a single piezoelectric transducer that modulates the refractive index only in one direction. This operating principle limits the performance of AODs to a narrow acoustic bandwidth of the transducer and a small angle of laser deflection governed by the Bragg diffraction. To overcome these two limitations, the operation of AODs with phased array ultrasonic transducers is analyzed in this study. Only the amplitude and frequency of the acoustic waves are modulated in conventional AODs. The phased array mechanism enables modulating the acoustic phase in addition to the amplitude and frequency modulations. The latter two phenomena affect the refractive index variation and its periodicity in the AOD medium, respectively, and the phase modulation produces tilted wavefronts due to diffraction and interference of the ultrasonic waves. Consequently, a tilted phase grating is formed inside the AOD device and the tilt angle automatically modifies the laser incident angle on the grating compared to the original angle of incidence on the AOD device. The acoustic frequency and amplitude are, therefore, modulated to achieve the Bragg diffraction under the new angle of incidence and maximize the diffraction efficiency, respectively. The phase grating can be tilted at any arbitrary angle by steering the ultrasonic beam in different directions. The beam steering can be achieved by operating the transducers with various time delays to generate ultrasonic waves of different phases. Due to the diffraction pattern of the ultrasonic intensity distribution, the refractive index varies both longitudinally and transversely to the beam steering direction, and two-dimensional refractive index modulation occurs when the transducers are very long in the third dimension. The acoustic waves affect the refractive index through the photoelastic effect by inducing mechanical strain waves in the AOD medium. The ultrasonic beam steering and the mechanical strain are determined using a modified Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction integral. This integral represents the mechanical displacement vector field produced by ultrasonic waves in solid media. An analytic expression is obtained for the displacement field and the resulting strain distribution is calculated using this expression. Based on the strain and the photoelastic constants, the two-dimensional variation in the refractive index is determined for single-crystal paratellurite TeO2 which is an excellent AOD material. Conventional two-dimensional coupled mode theory of AOD, which is based on only one-dimensional refractive index modulation, is extended in this study to analyze the effect of two-dimensional index variation on the performance of AODs. The diffraction efficiency and the laser beam deflection angle are determined for both plane waves and Gaussian laser beams by obtaining analytic solutions for the coupled mode equations. The diffraction efficiency is found to be nearly unity over a broad range of the acoustic frequency, and the deflection angle can also be increased by steering the ultrasonic beam at large angles.

Filaments are self-guided plasma channels generated from laser pulses with power above a critical value. They can propagate several times the Rayleigh length for diffraction and can travel through adverse atmospheric conditions. As such, filaments are useful in applications such as long wavelength electromagnetic and electric discharge guiding, and weather manipulation to name a few. Arrays of filaments can be useful to these applications, particularly in the generation of waveguides. However, understanding the filament-induced plasma dynamics of two closely propagating beams is crucial in designing the ideal waveguide. One common way to characterize a filament is through the electron density of the plasma channel, a property which has previously been proven to be clamped for a single filament. This work will show how the electron density can be enhanced through the use of two co-propagating beams, taking advantage of their interaction. Three cases were studied: two sub-critical beams, one subcritical beam and one filament, and two filaments. The separations and focusing conditions of the beams were also varied. Enhancement of the electron density and lengthening of the plasma lifetime will be discussed for each case.