Abstract: An optical fiber having a conductive layer disposed therearound has sections removed therefrom that form gaps that expose the underlying optical fiber. Light manifolds are formed at each gap, such as are provided by Bragg gratings photoinduced in the core at each gap, and photoconductive material is disposed at each of the gaps. An opaque coating may optionally be disposed over the outside of the photoconductive material to ensure that it is activated by light propagating within the optical fiber. Light transmitted down the fiber may be controllably coupled output of the fiber at each of the gaps. The optical fiber thus provides multiple functions including electrical conductor, light manifold, and substrate on which the photoconductive material is deposited.

Abstract: A probe for testing very high frequency circuit chips (34) includes a flexible membrane (12) having test probe contacts (14), arranged to contact pads (32) on the device under test to bias up, drive and load down the circuit under test. Various optically-addressable devices (68,130,202) are mounted on the membrane and either excited or probed by a laser beam (66) to transmit and/or sense very high frequency electrical signals to/from the device under test. The optically-addressable devices are excited or probed by a high bandwidth laser (64,66), and thus very high speed circuits may be driven by contact pads on the probe membrane and probed by a laser beam. Employing an optically transparent membrane (200) having test probe contacts (206,208) for bias, driving and loading a circuit under test, and having an electro-optic polymer layer (102, 202), a probing laser beam (204) may be directed through the membrane and the electro-optic polymer layer to sample an RF field generated by a device (214) under test.

Abstract: Optical breakdown in a transparent, non-linear medium used for optical phase conjugation or the like is induced by interaction with the medium of a strong laser beam propagating therethrough, resulting from electron avalanche breakdown and plasma formation. Application of an electrical potential to electrodes disposed across the laser focal volume in the medium causes optically and/or electrically ionized impurities to be removed from the non-linear medium and attached to the electrodes, thereby purifying the medium and raising the optical breakdown threshold. The threshold may be further raised by adjusting the electric potential to a magnitude at which free electrons are removed from the laser focal volume either during an optical pulse or before the arrival of subsequent pulses.

Abstract: An optical input beam is transmitted through a non-linear medium capable of two-wave mixing gain by photorefractive, Brillouin, Raman, or other non-linear optical mechanism. A psuedo-conjugator retroreflects the input beam which has passed through the medium, back into the medium. The retroreflected beam acts as a seed, which lowers the threshold for producing a self-pumped conjugate reflected beam in the medium by stimulated scattering. The pseudo-conjugator may be a flat array of retroreflecting elements in the form of spheres or corner reflectors. A mosaic pattern of conjugating elements can be phase-locked to yield larger apertures and/or energy scaling, in a master-oscillator, power-amplifier (MOPA), or a four-wave mixer (FWM) configuration. The retroreflected beam can be modulated to temporally encode information onto the conjugate beam, and/or polarized to increase the system efficiency. The input and self-pumped conjugate reflected beams can be used as reference or pump beams in a FWM configuration.