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A simple, new aptamer-photonic crystal encoded suspension array was designed to simultaneously quantify and qualify ochratoxin A(OTA) and fumonisin B1(FB1) in cereal samples. The aptamers of OTA and FB1 were immobilized on the surfaces of photonic crystals by chemical bonding. When the target mycotoxins appear in a sample, the fluorescence-labeled complementary DNA of the aptamer dissociates from their double DNA hybrid and results in an obvious decrease in fluorescence intensity of the microsphere. The difference value of fluorescent intensities for each kind of silica photonic crystal microsphere (SPCM) quantitatively conveys the concentration of mycotoxin, and the structure colors or reflectance peak positions of the SPCMs confirm the kind of mycotoxin detected. The reaction conditions including the immobilization method for aptamers, hybridization, and incubation conditions have been optimized. This developed method displayed a wide linear detection range (0.01-1 ng/mL for OTA and 0.001-1 ng/mL for FB1) and a low limit of detection (0.25 pg/mL for OTA and 0.16 pg/mL for FB1). The recovery rates in the spiked cereal samples ranged from 81.80% to 116.38% for OTA and 76.58%-114.79% for FB1. The positive detection results in the naturally contaminated cereal samples were in agreement with those of classic enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). This simple suspension array scheme displays a great application potential for the high throughput screen assay of mycotoxins.

Chirped biphotons generated via spontaneous parametric down-conversion in chirped quasi-phase-matched nonlinear crystals have ultrabroadband frequency spectra. However, the presence of quadratic frequency phase factor restricts their applications in quantum metrology and quantum lithography due to simultaneously lengthening the correlation times of biphotons. The key point to improve the temporal correlation of chirped biphotons is how to compensate for or remove the quadratic frequency phase factor. Phase compensation methods have been demonstrated to solve this problem in earlier reports. But the compressed efficiencies of these methods are strongly dependent on the length of the utilized dispersive medium and decreased by the higher-order dispersion of the dispersive medium. In this paper, based on the phase transform of a lens for a light field in spatial domain, we theoretically propose a method of the equivalent removal of the quadratic phase by realizing a Fresnel-zone lens-like modulation on the biphotons spectrum in frequency domain, thereby compressing the correlation time of chirped biphotons to the Fourier-transform limited width. By analogy to the idea of Fresnel wave zone plate, this lens-like modulation can be realized by dividing the biphoton spectrum into Fresnel frequency zones and applying only binary spectral phase (0, ) sequentially to these zones. The theoretical results show that the correlation time width of chirped biphotons can be reduced, and the correlation signal intensity can be increased compared with the original one, by a factor about 100 and 30, respectively. The physical reason is that these Fresnel frequency zones under binary spectral phase modulation will lead to constructive interference at zero delay and destructive interference elsewhere. This method can significantly enhance biphoton time correlation without biphoton signal loss and avoids the limitations of phase compensation methods. Therefore, we can obtain biphotons with both ultra-broad bandwidth and ultra-short correlation times by using our proposed method. The attainable compression efficiency is constrained by the division resolution of the Fresnel frequency zones and the precision of applied binary phase modulations. It should be noted that a constraint condition about crystal length, chirp parameter and the number of frequency zones is summarized in designing the experimental parameters for the desired compression goal. Since binary spectral phase and 0 are easy to obtain and calibrate in practice, we thus believe that our proposed method is feasible to implement experimentally. Moreover, the proposed method can also be generalized to other fields relating to the quadratic phase factor, such as two-photon absorption, second-harmonic generation and chirped pulse compression.

A highly tunable bandgap-guiding microstructured polymer optical fiber (mPOF) is designed by infiltrating the cladding air holes with a liquid crystal. Bandgap is blue shifted as temperature is increased. A high thermal tuning sensitivity of -5.5 nm/℃ is achieved at the long-wavelength edge of the bandgap. Mode properties and effective mode area of the fundamental mode are investigated by using the full-vector finite element method. The designed fiber has a large effective area and high power transmission coefficient between the index guiding modes and the bandgap guiding modes. Our results provide theoretical references for applications of mPOF in sensing and tunable fiber-optic devices.

Four kinds of microstructured polymer optical fibers based on Topas cyclic olefin copolymer(COC) are designed. The effective index of the fundamental mode, the mode area and the numerical aperture are calculated by using the finite element method. Effects of structure parameters upon the mode field distribution, single mode property and dispersion property are discussed. Structure parameters corresponding to very large or very small effective mode area, endless single mode operation and flattened-near-zero dispersion are obtained. These fibers have larger numerical apertures compared with silica or PMMA based ones, and display flattened-near-zero dispersion.