Abstract In this thesis the focus has been on laser speckle. It is done in collaboration with poLight. They are developing a projector, where laser light is the source of illumination. In such projectors, laser speckle degrades the image quality. The aim of this project is to construct a speckle reduction device to be used in the laser projector. The theory covers a description of laser speckle, how to reduce the speckle contrast, and five methods to so. We explain why speckle arises and which parameters we can manipulate to reduce the speckle contrast. The five speckle reduction methods included in this thesis are; vibrating diffuser, slowly moving diffuser, Hadamard matrices, scattering tube, and vibrating mirror. Large vibrational motions are unwanted, considering the size of the device, generation of noise, and problems with alignment of the optical components in the projector that this would lead to. The quality of the laser beam is prominent in order to produce a sharp image, thus the use of diffusers with large scattering angles is not a good solution. The scattering tubes, designed by poLight, are tubes filled with micro pearls in a polymer gel. The size of the pearls decides the nature of the scattering. Larger pearls will give less back scattering and more light transmitted in the forward direction. If the tubes are rotated in a well balanced device we can avoid generating vibrations. The Hadamard matrices is the only one of the five methods which is not based on a motion. The challenge is to find a SLM to implement the matrices. It requires a low response time in order to present enough matrices during the exposure time of the eye. The laboratory setup we use to measure the speckle contrast is an improved version of the setup constructed in the specialisation project. A screen was removed from the old setup, and the speckle is now imaged directly from the speckle reduction device. The measured speckle reduction is thus due to the device alone, and not affected by the screen. The results were reproducible and in agreement with what we expected. We implemented a vibrating diffuser, both the single and the slowly moving. A piece cut from a plastic bag and some Scotch Magic tape were used as diffusers. The tape is the strongest diffuser and gives the lowest speckle contrast, however, it also has the largest scattering angle. The single tape diffuser reduced the speckle contrast to $C = 0.112$. With two tape difusers in series the intensity in the images becomes too low to exploit the dynamic range of the CCD sensor. The result is a higher calcualted speckle contrast with two diffusers, $C=0.131$, even though it ought to be smaller. We tested five prototypes of the scattering tube with different concentrations. The tube with the highest concentration has the highest speckle reduction abilities. It also has the strongest scattering effect. The scattering is less than with the tape diffuser, and so is the speckle reduction. The speckle contrast is reduced to $C=0.320$ when the tube is rotated, and to $C=0.389$ when it is vibrated. The tubes was also tested in series with a ground glass. The ground glass acted as a second diffuser. In this setting, vibration and rotation of the tubes reduced the speckle contrast equally, $C approx 0.283$ From the measured speckle contrast of the diffusers and tubes in stationary conditions, a polarization analysis should show a depolarization of the laser beam. This were the case only for the plastic diffuser. It is assumed that the error lays with the polarization analysis. There should be a depolarization in the tape and a partial depolarization in the tubes. A calculation of the speckle size was performed as well. Based on the theory we expected the size of the speckle grains to be $sigma_s = 37.77~mu m$. From the Fourier analysis of a speckle image from the setup we calculated the speckle size to be $sigma_s = 5.35$~mm, which is approximately 140 times bigger. The expected speckle size is too small, because we did not take into account a small magnification in the setup. The Fourier analysis of discrete and limited sets of data points is probably the main explanation of the difference, but a more thorough study is needed.

This study will focus on strain induced by thermal history and thickness on antiferromagnetic epitaxial LaFeO3(110) thin films grown on Nb:SrTiO3(001) substrates. Lattice mismatching between film and substrate induce strain in the film lattice during growth of the film. This strain can be relaxed by thermal treatment after growth and may show tendencies in the domain size, shape and distribution related to strain. Thin films are grown in different thicknesses by rf magnetron sputtering and selected films are relaxed by thermal anneal treatment. The samples are investigated in room temperature and in heating experiments to obtain images of antiferromagnetic domain contrast along the L2 and L3 absorbtion egde of Fe by XMLD spectromicroscopy. Size of domains areas and contrast level are measured and related to the strain in the thin films. Averaged spectra of L2 absorbtion edge antiferromagnetic contrast showed a clearly observable domain contrast with consistently shaped energy spectrums. No difference in antiferromagnetic contrast due to lattice strain caused by lattice mismatching was observed. All as-grown samples showed comparable size, distribution and shape of antiferromagnetic domains on both polished and etched substrates. Relaxation of prepared samples in 1000±C for 12 hours in a 1 atm atmosphere of oxygen gave a distinct increase in size for the domains. Area calculation show a increase from typically 0.2 ¹m2 for as-grown films to 2 ¹m2 for relaxed films. Heating experiments estimate a Néel temperature of 625oK for as-grown films and 740oK for relaxed samples. The thermal anneal thus has a significant effect on LaFeO3 thin films as the domains increase in size and the Néel temperature in which the film is no longer antiferromagnetic increases to the Neel temperature of bulk LaFeO3. This preparation approach may be useful for further investigations of the exchange-bias effect.

This project was worked on during the autumn 2005 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications. The assignment was to write a new LabVIEW programme that is to run the measurement procedure of a laser probe setup. The setup is used in characterization of surface acoustic waves(SAW). A programme was written that contained the necessary functionality and proved to operate satisfactorily. Several measurements were made on a SAW transducer, accurately picturing the wave. Fourier analysis were performed on the collected data in order to separate the propagation directions. An absolute amplitude measurement was made on a heterodyne interferometer, and the result was compared to a similar scan made using the laser probe. The work shows that the setup is ready for calibration against the heterodyne interferometer, in order to enable the laser probe to measure absolute amplitude by itself.

Study of the Polarization Dependent Loss caused by the combined effect of orthogonality degradation and dynamic power fluctuations in a hybrid network, which combines circuit switching with packet switching to transmit applications with very different quality requirements on the same wavelength channel.

In this assignment the theoretical background for the nature of speckle is presented and practical work was done to reduce the speckle effect in a display system based on a laser source. This was done without any picture modulators, or any kind of line scan or flying spot scanning. Work was done to find the right setup to be able to as easy as possible characterize the statistics of the speckle in an image. A still image of an expanded laser spot worked as an image. A series of test sets were carried out to address the different factors which could make a difference on the speckle contrast and their role in such systems.

Polarization Effects in Wavelength Converters based on Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

In this project it has been focused on the use of a 7.42 um, 4 mW Quantum Cascade Laser in trace gas detection spectroscopy. Norsk Elektro Optikk (NEO) is in possession of a Nanoplus G2102/DFB2/5-12 QCL laser, that can be used in spectroscopic detection of H2O, CO2 and SO2 It has been attempted to construct a setup that can be used for spectroscopic measurements using a self constructed current driver module to produce current pulses for the QCL. The QCL is operated in pulsed mode, with pulses of <500 ns width, and a 1 kHz pulse repetition frequency. Temperature control of the laser has been conducted with a LaserGas II SP monitor module, and temperature has been kept at 280 K during testing. Initially, various test have been conducted to ensure the general functionality of the driver module, and to avoid damage to the QCL. Two different solutions for the transmission line from the driver to the QCL have also been examined, and it has been concluded that the current pulses supplied to the laser are of good quality with minor broadening and short rise/fall times. Furthermore an I-V characteristic for the laser has been produced by incrementing the laser driving current, and measuring the corresponding laser voltage. Measurements of the laser output power have been conducted using a CaF2 collimating lens to focus the laser beam onto a PVI-2TE-8 Vigo photovoltaic detector from Vigo Systems S.A. It has proved difficult to obtain a good signal from the detector, with the maximum voltage measured across a 50Ω shunt resistor being 3 mV. This is 100-200 mV less than what should be expected. Various methods of noise reduction have been applied to improve the detected signal, none have however provided any noticeable improvements. Several possible reasons for the generally low output have been examined.

The rules of quantum mechanics makes it possible to exchange a secret key at a distance. This is called quantum key distribution (QKD). In theory the key exchange can be made completely secure. Real QKD implementations however, has numerous imperfections. Luckily one has also been able to prove the security of QKD with a large variety of imperfections. The field of QKD has matured over the recent years, and it has now reached commercial applications with photons as the quantum bits, and optical fibers as the quantum channel. Today there are at least three commercial vendors of QKD-systems. We live in the times of quantum hacking. Researchers has begun the task of breaking the security of QKD-systems. Many new imperfections has been discovered, some of which might be used to break the security of QKD. This thesis is a study of the detector efficiency mismatch loophole. Most QKD-systems require two detectors, and it is virtually impossible to make two identical detectors with the exact same efficiency. What is worse, it turns out that the eavesdropper can often control the relative efficiencies of the two detectors trough some domain, for instance by controlling the timing, the frequency or the spacial mode of the photons. This can in turn be used by the eavesdropper to gain information about the secret key. Previously the best known attack would compromise security if the detector efficiency mismatch of about 1:15. Here the current attacks on systems with detector efficiency mismatch are improved to compromise security for a mismatch of about 1:4. This is less than the mismatch found in a commercial QKD-system, so the attack could in principle be used to eavesdrop on this QKD-system. One might try to close the loophole by modifying the implementation. One suggestion is the four state Bob. The problem is that this patch will in turn open other loopholes, and one of these loopholes reopen the detector efficiency mismatch loophole. One can remove Eves information about the key by doing a sufficient amount of extra privacy amplification. Here a general security bound is presented, quantifying the required amount of extra privacy amplification to remove Eve's information about the key. The proof is more general than the previous security proof, and is valid for any basis dependent, possibly lossy, linear optical imperfections in the channel and receiver/detectors. Since this is more realistic assumptions for a QKD-implementation, the proof represents a major step of closing the loophole in real devices.

GaAs/AlGaAs core-shell nanowires (NWs) were grown on GaAs(111)B substrates by Au-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to investigate how different Al compositions in the shell influences the structural and optical properties of the NWs. Investigations with a secondary electron microscope (SEM) revealed that an increase in Al content leads to an increase in radial growth rate and a decrease in the axial growth rate of the AlGaAs shell. Low temperature μ-photoluminescence (PL) measurements showed that there was great improvement in the luminescence for the GaAs/AlGaAs core-shell NWs compared to GaAs NWs without shell.

This master's thesis describe electromagnetic simulations of a gallium antimonide (GaSb) light emitting diode, LED. A problem for such devices is that most of the generated light is reflected from the surface due to total internal reflection, and is therefore prevented from coupling out of the semiconductor material. Etching out a 2D photonic crystal grating on the LED surface would put aside the absolute rule of total internal reflection, and could therefore be used to increase the total transmission. The simulation method which was developed was supposed to find geometry parameters for the photonic crystal to optimize the light extraction. A set of plane waves were therefore simulated using FDTD to build an equivalent to the Fresnel equations for the photonic crystal surface. From that the total transmittance and radiation patterns for the simulated geometries were calculated. The results indicated an increase in the transmission properties of up to 70% using a square grating of holes where the holes have a radius of 0.5µm, the hole depth is 0.4µm, and the grating constant is 1µm. A hexagonal grating of holes and a square grating of isotropically etched holes were also simulated, and featured improvements on the same scale, but with different dimensions for the holes. The simulations were computationally very demanding, and the simulation structure therefore had to be highly trimmed to limit the calculation time to reasonable values. This might have reduced the accuracy of the results. Especially the optimum grating constant, and the value of the optimum improvement itself is believed to be somewhat inaccurate.