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Image sensors used in consumer cameras only detect intensity of light. Spectral, angular, and phase information of incident light is largely lost. For conventional applications like photography, the intensity information with three color bands (RGB) is sufficient. However, for advanced sensing applications, such as autonomous vehicles, biomedical imaging, and robotics, extracting more information from the incident light could help machines to make better decisions. It is expected that, in the future, more cameras will be built for machines than for people, which will be further accelerated by the rapid progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence. We envision that these applications will substantially benefit from multimodal measurement of light fields by advanced imaging sensors. In this Perspective, we discuss recent progress in image sensors with multimodal capabilities.

Protein-based optical devices with biocompatibility and biodegradability have distinct advantages for applications in biomedical sensing. Silk fibroin with unique optical, thermal, and mechanical properties renders great flexibility in designing functional photonic platforms. Here, we report the experimental observation of optothermally induced mechanical oscillation in a silk-fibroin coated microcavity. Theoretical analysis reveals that the observed oscillation results from the interplay of several nonlinear effects in the silk-coated-microsphere as well as the coexistence of fast and slow thermal dynamic processes. The physics in our study breaks ground for the study of nonlinear dynamics of structural protein optical material that can be used for functional optical devices.

Thermal properties of a photonic resonator are determined not only by intrinsic properties of materials, such as thermo-optic coefficient, but also by the geometry and structure of the resonator. Techniques for characterization and measurement of thermal properties of individual photonic resonator will benefit numerous applications. In this work, we demonstrate a method to optically measure the thermal relaxation time and effective thermal conductance of a whispering gallery mode microcavity using optothermal effect. Two nearby optical modes within the cavity are optically probed, which allows us to quantify the thermal relaxation process of the cavity by analyzing changes in the transmission spectra induced by optothermal effect. We show that the effective thermal conductance can be experimentally deduced from the thermal relaxation measurement, and it can be tailored by changing the geometric parameters of the cavity. The experimental observations are in good agreement with the proposed analytical modeling. This method can be applied to various resonators in different forms.

We report Fano-like asymmetric resonances modulated by optical gain in a whispering-gallery-mode resonator fabricated from erbium-doped silica. A time-dependent gain profile leads to dynamically varying sharp asymmetric resonances with features similar to Fano resonances. Depending on the scan speed of the frequency of the probe laser and the pump-probe power ratio, transmission spectra of the active microcavity exhibit a resonance dip, a resonance peak, or a Fano-like resonance.

Electron beam-induced nanoinstabilities of pristine double-walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs) of two different configurations, one fixed at both ends and another fixed at only one end, were in-situ investigated in transmission electron microscope at room temperature. It was observed that the DWCNT fixed at both ends shrank in its diameter uniformly. Meanwhile, the DWCNT fixed at only one end intriguingly shrank preferentially from its free cap end along its axial direction whereas its diameter shrinkage was offset. A mechanism of “diffusion” along with “evaporation” at room temperature which is driven by the nanocurvature of the DWCNTs, and the athermal activation induced by the electron beam was proposed to elucidate the observed phenomena. The effect of the interlayer interaction of the DWCNTs was also discussed.

We demonstrate an optothermal resonance scanning scheme to obtain stable spectra of resonant modes in whispering gallery microresonators. A wavelength stability of 0.1 pm for a temperature variation of more than 10 °C is obtained. In this scheme, a resonance mode is thermally locked to a tunable laser, and its wavelength is linearly scanned across the lasing line of a fixed wavelength laser. The scheme enables reliable and accurate readings for whispering gallery mode (WGM) sensing platforms and allows the spectroscopy of WGM resonators within wavelength bands where tunable lasers are not available.

Scatterer induced modal coupling and the consequent mode splitting in a whispering gallery mode resonator is demonstrated in aqueous environment. The rate of change in splitting as particles enter the resonator mode volume strongly depends on the concentration of particle solution: The higher is the concentration, the higher is the rate of change. Polystyrene nanoparticles of radius 50nm with concentration as low as 5x10^(-6)wt% have been detected using the mode splitting spectra. Observation of mode splitting in water paves the way for constructing advanced resonator based sensors for measuring nanoparticles and biomolecules in various environments., 8 pages, 4 figures, 21 References

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) optical microspheres are fabricated and whispering gallery modes with quality factors of 106 in the 1480 nm band are demonstrated. The dependence of the resonance shifts on the input power is investigated in both the transient (blueshift) and the steady-state (redshift) regimes. Moreover, we demonstrate that such high-Q PDMS optical resonators can be used as highly sensitive thermal sensors with temperature sensitivity of 0.245 nm/°C, which is one order of magnitude higher than conventional silica microsphere resonators. The estimated thermal resolution of the sensor is 2×10−4 °C.

We study both experimentally and theoretically the coupling between a fiber taper and two whispering-gallery modes, which are simultaneously excited in a single pilydimethyl-siloxane-coated silica microtoroid system. The transmission spectrum of the fiber-coupled two-mode microresonator shows a sharp electromagnetically induced transparency-like window within the resonant absorption region. This line shape results from destructive interference between two optical pathways associated with two distinct coexisting modes in a single resonator. The sharp transparency peak has great potential applications in light modulation and highly sensitive biochemical sensors.

We experimentally and theoretically characterize the thermal refraction effect in a silica microtoroid and demonstrate that such effect can be reduced or even eliminated by applying a thin layer of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to the surface of the silica resonator. By increasing the coating thickness, the whispering gallery modes (WGMs) experience a transition from redshift to blueshift induced by thermal absorption. Experiment results demonstrate that at the thickness of 0.52 μm, the fundamental WGM with observed Q factor of 1.5×106 shows no shift with the input optical power since the thermal refraction of the silica for this mode is compensated completely by the PDMS layer, which has an opposite thermal refraction effect. This work shows that the PDMS layer could be used to reduce thermal noise in high-Q silica microcavities for applications in sensing, lasing, and nonlinear optics.

A controllable and reversible transition between parametric and Raman oscillations in an ultrahigh-Q silica toroidal microcavity is experimentally demonstrated and theoretically analyzed. By direct change of cavity loading and indirect adjustment of frequency detuning, parametric and/or Raman oscillation can be accessed selectively without modification of cavity geometry in a toroidal microcavity with a large enough aspect ratio. Based on an effective cavity gain theory, this transition is analyzed in terms of cavity loading and frequency detuning leading to a better understanding of the combined effects of parametric and Raman processes in silica microcavities.