In this work, we present the design and fabrication of a fiber device that performs digital droplet microfluidics for molecular diagnostics. A variety of fibers and capillaries were used to build three connected modules dedicated to droplet generation, incubation, and fluorescence detection which enables a uniaxial arrangement. This is in contrast to the traditional 2-dimensional lab-on-a-chip architecture. We characterize our fiber device using a fluorescein dilution series. Our observed detection limit is on the order of 10 nM fluorescein. We demonstrate our all-fiber device for the fluorescence readout after loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) of synthetic SARS-CoV-2. Our results suggest that this fiber device can successfully distinguish between positive and negative samples in molecular diagnostics. We propose that our fiber device offers benefits over microfluidic chip techniques such as easier optical integration, much simpler sample loading, and faster diagnosis with high specificity and sensitivity.
We suppress stimulated Brillouin scattering in an erbium-doped optical fiber amplifier for 50-ns-long transform-limited signal pulses by counter-directional pumping with a pulse burst. The pump pulse burst is codirectional with the parasitic Brillouin Stokes wave, which, therefore, undergoes cross-phase modulation and thus spectral broadening due to the intensity-modulated pump. The broadening inhibits its growth. We experimentally study the effect of pump pulse parameters and improve the SBS threshold by up to 4 dB when amplifying signal pulses at a wavelength of 1565 nm with pumping at 1536 nm.
We numerically simulate and optimize a high-power fiber Raman amplifier cladding pumped by spectrally combined diode lasers at wavelengths from ∼0.9 to ∼1 μm in the continuous-wave regime. This amplified a signal at the first-Stokes wavelength of 1024 nm. We found that it was possible to add pumps over an increasingly wide wavelength span up to ∼90 nm, while still maintaining an incremental conversion efficiency higher than 60%, even though the Raman linewidth is only ∼15 nm. We investigated the dependence on the power of individual diode lasers and on the wavelength spacing and found that the total conversion efficiency reaches ∼70 % with realistic pump sources based on state-of-the-art diode lasers. We believe this study shows the potential for high-power fiber Raman lasers pumped by spectrally combined multiwavelength diode and fiber laser sources.
We investigate the use of external phase modulation to broaden the linewidth of a laser source. We use nonlinear optimization to find phase modulations that create nearly tophat-shaped discrete spectra and thus the highest total power within a limited linewidth and a limited peak spectral power density. Such phase modulations and spectra can be realized with an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) and are attractive for suppressing stimulated Brillouin scattering in optical fiber. Compared to alternative modulation approaches, the AWG benefits from a large number of degrees of freedom and well-controlled spectral phase in the AWG output.
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