This thesis describes design, fabrication, and characterizations of high-Tc transition edge sensor (TES) detectors aiming at cryogen-free infrared application. TES is a superconducting thermometer based bolometric detector, whose operating resistance is strongly dependent on temperature, and therefore shows much higher sensitivity than standard non-superconducting bolometers. This thesis starts from the overview of major infrared detectors, then discusses in detail the theoretical background of a TES detector and some important figures of merit in evaluating its performance. Some TES arrays that are currently in use or under development for astronomical, ground or space-based missions are reviewed. The core of this thesis is the design and fabrication process of a TES detector, which is presented as a live report in Chapter 3 and provides useful guide for future detector fabrication. In order to evaluate performance of our devices, a cryogen-free cryostat is used for testing and its operational mechanics is introduced. In the final part, the experimental configurations for different tests are delivered, and the figures of merit mentioned above are measured and used to characterize fabrication results. / xv, 152 leaves : col. ill. ; 29 cm

Phased-array antennas are commonplace in the radiofrequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Exploitation of phasing effects between multiple antennas facilitates a wide range of applications, including synthetic-aperture radar, beam forming, and beam scanning. For the first time, the phased addition of multiple dipole antennas is demonstrated in the infrared, at a wavelength of 10.6 micrometers. Coplanar strip lines are used to interconnect the antennas, preserving the phase of the individual contributions. Several different proof-of-concept experiments are performed, using planar antennas fabricated with direct-write electron-beam lithography. Infrared-frequency currents from two dipole antennas are summed together at a common feedpoint and dissipated in a bolometric load. Angular pattern measurements show that the direction of maximum gain depends on the phase difference between the antennas. As more antennas are added together in phase, beam narrowing is observed in the angular response. Another experiment uses a two-dipole array to directly measure the magnitude of the mutual coherence function, at the plane of the antennas, of a spatially incoherent narrowband source. Measurements are also made of the broadside antenna response comparing air-side and substrate-side situations for a dipole antenna fabricated on a hemispherical immersion lens. In all cases, the measured behavior is confirmed by electromagnetic analysis.

Noninvasive glucose monitoring has been the subject of considerable research because of the high number of diabetes patients who must monitor their glucose levels daily by taking blood samples. Among methods being evaluated for possible use in this application, near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has received significant attention because of available glucose absorption bands that can be observed in the presence of the large aqueous background found in tissue spectra. The objective of the research presented here is to evaluate the potential for implementing a noninvasive nocturnal hypoglycemic alarm with NIR spectroscopy. Such an alarm would be used by a diabetic to detect potentially dangerous occurrences of hypoglycemia during sleep. The approach used is to collect spectra continuously from the patient during the sleep period, followed by the application of pattern recognition methods to determine if a spectrum represents a blood glucose level that exceeds a hypoglycemic threshold. A reference spectrum is collected and a conventional finger-stick glucose concentration measurement is made at the start of the sleep period. The ratio is then taken of each subsequent spectrum to the collected reference, forming a differential spectrum corresponding to the signed difference in concentration relative to the reference. The identification of these differential spectra as "alarm" or "non-alarm" is performed with a classification model computed with piecewise linear discriminant analysis. This methodology is initially tested with in vitro laboratory data that simulated the glucose excursions that occur during sleep. The performance of the hypoglycemic alarm methodology in the presence of varying levels of urea, glyceryl triacetate, and L-lactate as potential spectral interferents is tested. The robustness of the methodology with respect to time is also evaluated. The thesis further discusses an experimental procedure to prepare tissue phantoms composed of two main proteins that exist in human skin tissue, keratin and collagen. A new methodology is developed to produce varying-thickness films that allowed the simulation of changes in the content of skin tissue proteins present within the optical path of the NIR measurement. The prepared films are incorporated into in vitro laboratory measurements in which varying levels of glucose, urea, keratin, and collagen are introduced in order to provide a test of the hypoglycemic alarm algorithm that simulates the spectral properties of human tissue. Finally, the hypoglycemic alarm algorithm is tested with in vivo data collected with rat animal models. Data are presented for single-day experiments performed with anesthetized rats, as well as for multiple-day experiments conducted with awake rats. The results obtained from both the in vitro and in vivo studies confirm that if high-quality spectral data are attainable, the alarm methodology can work effectively to identify hypoglycemic events while exhibiting a low rate of false detections.

No description available.

This thesis deals with infrared studies of impurity states, ultrafast carrier dynamics as well as coherent intersubband polarizations in semiconductor quantum structures such as quantum wells and superlattices, based on the GaAs/AlGaAs material system. In the first part it is shown that the 2pz confined impurity state of a semiconductor quantum well develops into an excited impurity band in the case of a superlattice. This is studied by following theoretically the transition from a single to a multiple quantum well or superlattice by exactly diagonalizing the three-dimensional Hamiltonian for a quantum well system with random impurities. Intersubband absorption experiments, which can be nearly perfectly reproduced by the theory, corroborate this interpretation, showing that at low temperatures in the low doping density regime all optical transitions originate from impurity transitions. These results also require reinterpretation of previous experimental data. The relaxation dynamics of interminiband transitions in doped GaAs/AlGaAs superlattices in the mid-IR are studied. This involves single-color pump-probe measurements to explore the dynamics at different wavelengths, which is performed with the Rossendorf freeelectron laser (FEL), providing picosecond pulses in a range from 3-200 µm and are used for the first time within this thesis. In these experiments, a fast bleaching of the interminiband transition is observed followed by thermalization and subsequent relaxation, whose time constants are determined to be 1-2 picoseconds. This is followed by an additional component due to carrier cooling in the lower miniband. In the second part, two-color pump-probe measurements are performed, involving the FEL as the pump source and a table-top broad-band tunable THz source for probing the transmission changes. These measurements allow a separate specification of the cooling times after a strong excitation, exhibiting time constants from 230 ps to 3 ps for different excitation densities and miniband widths. In addition, the dynamics of excited electrons within the minibands is explored and their contribution quantitatively extracted from the measurements. Intersubband absorption experiments of photoexcited carriers in single quantum well structures, measured directly in the time-domain, i.e. probing coherently the polarization between the first and the second subband, are presented. From the data we can directly extract the density and temperature dependence of the intersubband dephasing time between the two lowest subbands, ranging from 50 up to 400 fs. This all optical approach gives us the ability to tune the carrier concentration over an extremely wide range which is not accessible in a doped quantum well sample. By varying the carrier density, many-body effects such as the depolarization and their influence on the spectral position as well as on the lineshape on the intersubband dephasing are studied. Also the difference of excitonic and free-carrier type excitation is discussed, and indication of an excitonic intersubband transition is found.

This thesis deals with infrared studies of impurity states, ultrafast carrier dynamics as well as coherent intersubband polarizations in semiconductor quantum structures such as quantum wells and superlattices, based on the GaAs/AlGaAs material system. In the first part it is shown that the 2pz confined impurity state of a semiconductor quantum well develops into an excited impurity band in the case of a superlattice. This is studied by following theoretically the transition from a single to a multiple quantum well or superlattice by exactly diagonalizing the three-dimensional Hamiltonian for a quantum well system with random impurities. Intersubband absorption experiments, which can be nearly perfectly reproduced by the theory, corroborate this interpretation, showing that at low temperatures in the low doping density regime all optical transitions originate from impurity transitions. These results also require reinterpretation of previous experimental data. The relaxation dynamics of interminiband transitions in doped GaAs/AlGaAs superlattices in the mid-IR are studied. This involves single-color pump-probe measurements to explore the dynamics at different wavelengths, which is performed with the Rossendorf freeelectron laser (FEL), providing picosecond pulses in a range from 3-200 µm and are used for the first time within this thesis. In these experiments, a fast bleaching of the interminiband transition is observed followed by thermalization and subsequent relaxation, whose time constants are determined to be 1-2 picoseconds. This is followed by an additional component due to carrier cooling in the lower miniband. In the second part, two-color pump-probe measurements are performed, involving the FEL as the pump source and a table-top broad-band tunable THz source for probing the transmission changes. These measurements allow a separate specification of the cooling times after a strong excitation, exhibiting time constants from 230 ps to 3 ps for different excitation densities and miniband widths. In addition, the dynamics of excited electrons within the minibands is explored and their contribution quantitatively extracted from the measurements. Intersubband absorption experiments of photoexcited carriers in single quantum well structures, measured directly in the time-domain, i.e. probing coherently the polarization between the first and the second subband, are presented. From the data we can directly extract the density and temperature dependence of the intersubband dephasing time between the two lowest subbands, ranging from 50 up to 400 fs. This all optical approach gives us the ability to tune the carrier concentration over an extremely wide range which is not accessible in a doped quantum well sample. By varying the carrier density, many-body effects such as the depolarization and their influence on the spectral position as well as on the lineshape on the intersubband dephasing are studied. Also the difference of excitonic and free-carrier type excitation is discussed, and indication of an excitonic intersubband transition is found.

No description available.

<p>An image that has been subject to the out-of-focus phenomenon has reducedsharpness, contrast and level of detail depending on the amount of defocus. Torestore out-of-focused images is a complex task due to the information loss thatoccurs. However there exist many restoration algorithms that attempt to revertthis defocus by estimating a noise model and utilizing the point spread function.The purpose of this thesis, proposed by FLIR Systems, was to find a robustalgorithm that can restore focus and from the customer’s perspective be userfriendly. The thesis includes three implemented algorithms that have been com-pared to MATLABs built-in. Three image series were used to evaluate the limitsand performance of each algorithm, based on deblurring quality, implementationcomplexity, computation time and usability.Results show that the Alternating Direction Method for total variation de-convolution proposed by Tao et al. [29] together with its the modified discretecosines transform version restores the defocused images with the highest qual-ity. These two algorithms include features such as, fast computational time, fewparameters to tune and a powerful noise reduction.</p>

Ce manuscrit présente le transfert d’une référence de fréquence optique ultra-stable à un lien optique et son application à la stabilisation en fréquence d’un laser moyen-infrarouge. Un lien optique permet de transférer une fréquence ultra-stable par fibre optique sans dégrader sa stabilité grâce à une compensation du bruit apportée lors de la propagation. Nous avons étendu cette technique à des liens de grande longueur en transférant la référence de fréquence simultanément avec les données du réseau Internet. Ainsi des liens de 300 km puis 540 km ont été démontrés avec une stabilité de l’ordre de 10⁻ ¹⁹ à 10⁴ s. Ce dispositif à été utilisé au LPL pour asservir un laser CO² émettant à 10 µm sur une référence de fréquence développée au LNE-SYRTE, à l’Observatoire de Paris. Celle-ci est constituée d’un laser ultra-stable émettant à 1,54 µm, dont la fréquence est mesurée par rapport aux étalons primaires du LNE-SYRTE grâce à un laser femtoseconde. Cette référence est transférée par un lien optique jusqu’au LPL où elle permet de stabiliser la fréquence de répétition d’un second laser femtoseconde et de mesurer ou contrôler la fréquence d’un laser CO² . Lorsque celui-ci est asservi sur une référence moléculaire (OsO₄), la stabilité est de 4.10⁻¹⁴ à 1 s. Les performances sont encore meilleures lorsque le laser CO² est asservi directement sur la référence optique. Le laser stabilisé pourra ensuite être utilisé pour l’expérience d’observation de la violation de parité dans les molécules chirales développées au LPL. Ceci démontre la faisabilité d’expériences de spectroscopie moléculaire à ultra haute résolution dans les laboratoires ne disposant pas d’étalons de fréquence. / This manuscript details the transfer of an ultra-stable optical frequency reference by means of an optical link and its application to the phase-lock of a mid-infared laser. An optical fiber link allows the ultra-stable transfer of a frequency by using a scheme wich compensates the propagation noise. We extended this system to longer links, and transferred the optical frequency reference simultaneously witn internet data. A cascaded link of 300 km and a simple link of 540 km had been demonstrated with a stability of 10⁻ ¹⁹ at 10⁴ s. Such a link as been used to lock a CO² laser at LPL, emitting at 10 µm, to a frequency reference developed at LNE-SRTE, Observatoire de Paris. This reference is an ultra-stable laser, emitting at 1.54 µm, the frequency of wich is measured against the primary standards of LNE-SYRTE by using a femtosecond laser. This reference is tranferred by an optical link to LPL, in order to stabilize the repetition rate of a second femtosecondlaser and to measure or control the frenquency of a CO² laser. When the CO² laser is locked to a molecular reference (OsO₄), the stability is 4.10⁻¹⁴ at 1s. The performances are even better when the CO² laser is locked directly to the optical reference. Then the laser coulb be used for the experiment of observation of the parity violation in chiral molecules, in progress at LPL. This shows the feasability of high resolution molecular spectroscopy experiments in laboratoratories in wich there is no primary standards.

An image that has been subject to the out-of-focus phenomenon has reducedsharpness, contrast and level of detail depending on the amount of defocus. Torestore out-of-focused images is a complex task due to the information loss thatoccurs. However there exist many restoration algorithms that attempt to revertthis defocus by estimating a noise model and utilizing the point spread function.The purpose of this thesis, proposed by FLIR Systems, was to find a robustalgorithm that can restore focus and from the customer’s perspective be userfriendly. The thesis includes three implemented algorithms that have been com-pared to MATLABs built-in. Three image series were used to evaluate the limitsand performance of each algorithm, based on deblurring quality, implementationcomplexity, computation time and usability.Results show that the Alternating Direction Method for total variation de-convolution proposed by Tao et al. [29] together with its the modified discretecosines transform version restores the defocused images with the highest qual-ity. These two algorithms include features such as, fast computational time, fewparameters to tune and a powerful noise reduction.