Canada

Strong field physics, femtosecond (1 fs = $10^{-15}$), and attosecond (1 as = $10^{-18}$) science require intense ultrashort laser pulses for excitation and measurement. Although fs pulses can be generated directly from a laser amplifier, durations necessary for ultrafast science require spectral broadening and compression. The most common spectral broadening technique exploits the nonlinear interaction of intense pulses focused into gas-filled hollow-core fibres [1]. These fibres allow for a long interaction length to generate octave-spanning spectra while maintaining a near Gaussian spatial distribution. However, these fibres can be 1 – 3 metres on an optical table with additional 1 m focusing and collimating optics, and require continuous backfilled gas flow. More recently, the self-phase modulation in thin crystals broadens the spectrum and uses a self-focusing relay to maintain the beam quality [2]. A combination of solids and gases to generate a supercontinuum has been used to generate attosecond extreme ultraviolet (XUV) pulses [3]. Ultrashort pulses can have a wide variety of applications, including disrupting biological processes for medical procedures, observation of electronic processes on an attosecond scale, and generating XUV and soft X-ray pulses via high harmonic generation or terahertz via difference frequency generation [4]. Here, we compare numerically and experimentally the spectral broadening in solvents and crystals to demonstrate the potential for a compact setup for generating octave spanning pulses for ultrafast experiments. 

We find that passing a beam through several cm of methanol produces a supercontinuum spectrum that can support few-fs pulses. Similar to the multi-plate thin crystal method, we place a series of 1 cm cuvettes of methanol around two foci in order to reduce self-focussing effects and to avoid filamentation within the material. We compress these pulses using dispersion compensating mirrors, and characterize the resulting pulses using frequency resolved optical gating (FROG) and a novel measurement scheme. Our simulations and models predict a sub-10 fs bandwidth-limited pulse resulting from two subsequent compressions using a total of 4 cm of methanol to generate a supercontinuum. Using this method, experimentally, we have achieved a broad spectrum capable of supporting sub-30 fs pulses.


[1] E. Haddad, R. Safaei, A. Leblanc, R. Piccoli, Y.G. Jeong, H. Ibrahim,B.E. Schmidt, R. Morandotti, L. Razzari, F. Légaré, P. Lassonde. &quot;Molecular gases for pulse compression in hollow core fibers,&quot; Optics Express (2018).

[2] Y.-C. Cheng, C.-H. Lu, Y.-Y. Lin, and A. H. Kung, &quot;Supercontinuum generation in a multi-plate medium,&quot; Optics Express (2016).

[3] T. J. Hammond, S. Monchocé, C. Zhang, G. Vampa, D. Klug, A. Y. Naumov, D. M. Villeneuve, and P. B. Corkum &quot;Integrating solids and gases for attosecond pulse generation,&quot; Nature Photonics (2017).

[4] M. Cheng, A. Reynolds, H. Widgren, and M. Khalil, &quot;Generation of tunable octave-spanning mid-infrared pulses by filamentation in gas media,&quot; Optics Letters (2012).

CAP Virtual Congress 2021

Novel Methods for Pulse Compression

broadening

spectrum

ultrafast

nonlinear

optics

**WELCOME TO THE 2021 CAP VIRTUAL CONGRESS UNDERLINE PLATFORM**

The CAP staff and our organizing and program committees are pleased to welcome you to our 2021 Congress filled with plenary talks, technical sessions/talks, student presentations and competition sessions, workshops, and several symposia offered by the CAP divisions and its partners.  

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Strong field physics, femtosecond (1 fs = $10^{-15}$), and attosecond (1 as = $10^{-18}$) science require intense ultrashort laser pulses for excitation and measurement. Although fs pulses can be generated directly from a laser amplifier, durations necessary for ultrafast science require spectral broadening and compression. The most common spectral broadening technique exploits the nonlinear interaction of intense pulses focused into gas-filled hollow-core fibres [1]. These fibres allow for a long interaction length to generate octave-spanning spectra while maintaining a near Gaussian spatial distribution. However, these fibres can be 1 – 3 metres on an optical table with additional 1 m focusing and collimating optics, and require continuous backfilled gas flow. More recently, the self-phase modulation in thin crystals broadens the spectrum and uses a self-focusing relay to maintain the beam quality [2]. A combination of solids and gases to generate a supercontinuum has been used to generate attosecond extreme ultraviolet (XUV) pulses [3]. Ultrashort pulses can have a wide variety of applications, including disrupting biological processes for medical procedures, observation of electronic processes on an attosecond scale, and generating XUV and soft X-ray pulses via high harmonic generation or terahertz via difference frequency generation [4]. Here, we compare numerically and experimentally the spectral broadening in solvents and crystals to demonstrate the potential for a compact setup for generating octave spanning pulses for ultrafast experiments. 

We find that passing a beam through several cm of methanol produces a supercontinuum spectrum that can support few-fs pulses. Similar to the multi-plate thin crystal method, we place a series of 1 cm cuvettes of methanol around two foci in order to reduce self-focussing effects and to avoid filamentation within the material. We compress these pulses using dispersion compensating mirrors, and characterize the resulting pulses using frequency resolved optical gating (FROG) and a novel measurement scheme. Our simulations and models predict a sub-10 fs bandwidth-limited pulse resulting from two subsequent compressions using a total of 4 cm of methanol to generate a supercontinuum. Using this method, experimentally, we have achieved a broad spectrum capable of supporting sub-30 fs pulses.


[1] E. Haddad, R. Safaei, A. Leblanc, R. Piccoli, Y.G. Jeong, H. Ibrahim,B.E. Schmidt, R. Morandotti, L. Razzari, F. Légaré, P. Lassonde. "Molecular gases for pulse compression in hollow core fibers," Optics Express (2018).

[2] Y.-C. Cheng, C.-H. Lu, Y.-Y. Lin, and A. H. Kung, "Supercontinuum generation in a multi-plate medium," Optics Express (2016).

[3] T. J. Hammond, S. Monchocé, C. Zhang, G. Vampa, D. Klug, A. Y. Naumov, D. M. Villeneuve, and P. B. Corkum "Integrating solids and gases for attosecond pulse generation," Nature Photonics (2017).

[4] M. Cheng, A. Reynolds, H. Widgren, and M. Khalil, "Generation of tunable octave-spanning mid-infrared pulses by filamentation in gas media," Optics Letters (2012).

poster

Autopsy studies indicate that the distribution of axons throughout the brain could differ in brains with and without schizophrenia. MRI has inferred axon diameters and distribution in the brain, typically for axons larger than 5 μm in diameter. The goal of this work is to modify these methods to adapt oscillating gradients (OG) to target small axons (1 to 2 μm range) which constitute the majority of cortical connections and shorten the data acquisition time so that the method can be used to measure axon diameters in *vivo*.
Methods to determine micron-sized axon radii using oscillating gradients were too time-consuming for in *vivo* mouse imaging. The methods use many gradient frequencies, and a geometric model called AxCaliber which uses intracellular and extracellular compartments. Through simulations, we found that fewer gradient frequencies for data provided a good fit to the intracellular model, and in some cases, fewer frequencies led to a better fit to the model than more frequencies. A moderate correlation was found between the predicted axonal radius from the model and the actual axonal radius used in the simulations. In conclusion, reducing the number of gradient frequencies and gradient strengths appears to be possible, in theory, to reduce the imaging time by a factor of 4.16 without a significant change in the precision of the inferred axon radii. The method proposed here requires *a priori* knowledge of the desired cell sizes to be inferred. Imaging data, as well as electron microscopy data, need to be collected after reopening the lab after the pandemic to verify the theoretical predictions. This work is the first step to reducing the imaging time so that OG can be used with the AxCaliber model to infer 1-2 μm axon sizes.
The authors wish to acknowledge funding from Mitacs and NSERC.

Moving toward faster measurements of micron-sized axon diameters in vivo

A prototype medical device has been developed and built at Western University to image adolescents with hemophilic arthropathy. The device consists of a plastic cylindrical tub able to rotate freely about a base plate. A 10 MHz linear array ultrasound transducer by Canon Medical Systems is mounted to the inside of the tub pointed toward its center. The tub is filled with water to act as a medium between the ultrasound transducer and the skin. The leg or arm is fixed, while a clinical ultrasound probe rotates over 360 degrees. 2D US images are recorded every 0.5 degrees, and reconstructed into a 3D volume in an inverse fan geometry. The 3D image provides a viewpoint that is unreachable in conventional 2D ultrasonography. The prototype design, study protocol workflow, and preliminary results will be presented; specifically showing corresponding anatomical landmarks between 3D ultrasound and MR images. The future work for the study is a clinical trial at SickKids Hospital in Toronto; whereby, ultrasound / MRI data from each subject will be viewed by two experienced musculoskeletal radiologists who are blinded to the other aspects of the study. Interpretations from both modalities will gauge the feasibility of this approach for use in imaging of hemophilic arthropathy in target joints.

Multi-Modality Comparison of Wrist and Ankle joints: A Feasibility Study

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a laser-based spectrochemical technique that allows a near-instantaneous measurement of the elemental composition of a target by making time-resolved spectroscopic analyses of laser-induced ablation plasmas. Utilizing nanosecond laser pulses and a broadband high-resolution Echelle spectrometer, high signal-to-noise optical emission spectra can be obtained from almost any desired target.

When the ablation target contains bacterial cells, the inorganic elements present in the bacterial cells (phosphorous, magnesium, calcium, and sodium) can be used to discriminate the bacteria on the basis of their atomic emission spectrum alone. Currently, we deposit bacterial cells onto a nitrocellulose filtration medium by centrifuging very low titer liquid specimens through a custom-fabricated centrifuge tube insert device. Prior to centrifugation, the bacteria cells are obtained by swabbing abiotic surfaces upon which a known number of bacteria cells have been deposited. The cells are then shaken off the disposable pathology swabs into a water suspension in a vortex mixing instrument.

Spectra from five different bacterial pathogens and pathogen surrogates (Staphylococcus epidermidis, Escherichia coli, Mycobacterium smegmatis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterococcus faecalis) and sterile water control specimens have been obtained along with spectra from sterile deionized water control specimens. 

This presentation will detail our efforts to identify and optimize chemometric algorithms for the autonomous classification of unknown spectra. Algorithms such as principal component analysis (PCA), discriminant function analysis (DFA), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA), and artificial neural networks (ANN) have been investigated. Rates of sensitivity and specificity have been determined and will be presented for the various techniques. Efforts to use chemometric algorithms to discriminate low-titer suspensions from blank water specimens and thus calculate limits of detection and limits of identification will also be discussed.

Quantification of Sensitivity and Specificity in a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy Diagnostic Assay for Pathogenic Bacteria Detection and Classification

**Effect of Lung Surfactant Protein B Fragment, SP-B1-9 on Model Lipid Bilayer.**
Abinu, MHK, ISV, MRM

Lung surfactant is a mixture of protein and lipid that reduces surface tension at the air-water interface in the lungs and thus reduces the work needed to breathe. Two hydrophobic proteins, SP-B and SP-C, are thought to facilitate the re-spreading of fresh and recycled surfactant material from bilayer and multilayer reservoirs. In an earlier deuterium NMR study of bilayer model membranes containing either the SP-B fragment SP-B(1-25, 63-78) or the fragment SP-B(8-25, 63-78), it was found that lipid acyl chain orientational order was perturbed more strongly by SP-B(1-25, 63-78). Both fragments contain the first and last SP-B helices but differ in whether or not the insertion motif, SP-B1-7, is present, suggesting that the insertion motif might play a role in the capacity of SP-B to promote the bilayer reorganization implicit in lung surfactant function. To gain more insight into the interaction of the insertion motif with surfactant lipids, we have studied the effect of SP-B1-9 on lipid acyl chain order in DPPC-d62 /POPG(7:3) bilayers using deuterium NMR and GROMACS molecular dynamics simulations.
Using deuterium NMR at a peptide: lipid ratio of 0.065, we find that the peptide tends to disorder acyl chains in the liquid crystalline bilayer phase suggesting that it promotes an increase in average lipid headgroup separation. MD simulation of a bilayer model containing SP-B1-9 at a peptide: lipid ratio of 0.031 also shows a decrease in chain orientational order. The MD simulations also provide information about the average peptide orientation and conformation. These findings may provide a better understanding of the extent to which the insertion motif may contribute to the capacity of SP-B to promote reorganization of bilayer surfactant material.

Supported by NSERC Discovery Grants to MRM and ISV.

Effect of Lung Surfactant Protein B Fragment, SP-B1-9 on Model Lipid Bilayer.

From cytoskeleton to centriole, we investigate the photonic inner workings of the living cell. The cytoskeleton provides the structural organization of the cell, as the supporting architecture for all known forms of life. A major structural unit of this architecture is the cellular “microtubule,” a hollow tubular body composed of individual units of the protein “tubulin” organized in an array of spiral-shaped components. Recently, it was proposed that microtubules may exhibit useful photonic properties, as well as a myriad of known structural features. In this work, we explore the role that photonic super-radiance may play in facilitating excitonic transport and communication within the cellular architecture, from the cytoskeleton to the eukaryotic centriole—and beyond.

Photonic Cooperativity and Coherence in Tubulin Architectures

When a chemical bond breaks, all valence electrons in the bond will re-arrange and transfer as the nuclei are separating. The dynamical information of such electronic re-arrangement processes will be encoded in the kinetic energy of the ions if the breaking neutral molecule is ionized, allowing us to follow the entire electronic re-arrangement process by only observing the ions. Here, using Cold Target Recoil Ion Momentum Spectroscopy (COLTRIMS) and a pump-probe experiment in the bromine molecule. we show how the single ionization reveals the bond breaking while the double ionization measures the separation distance of the neutral dissociating bromine molecule. In addition, we also studied the vibrational wave packet dynamics of bromine single ion, which is pumped by a strong 800nm pulse and probed by another weak 400nm pulse.

Light-induced dissociation dynamics of Br2

The connection between quantum entanglement and classical chaos has puzzled physicists for decades. To understand chaos in the quantum context, it is necessary to explore signatures of chaos in the deep quantum regime, where the quantum-classical correspondence cannot be invoked. A common approach is to study the quantum kicked top, which is a finite-dimensional quantum system that displays chaotic dynamics in the classical limit. Few experimental realizations of the quantum kicked top have been achieved for small number of time steps and low chaoticity parameters. However, the problem of accurate experimental realization of long-term dynamics and large range of chaoticity parameter in the quantum kicked top is still unsolved. In this work we propose and demonstrate an exact simulation of the 2-qubit quantum kicked top on a universal quantum computer. Our proposal allows for arbitrary time steps and chaoticity parameter without compromising experimental fidelity. Using the IBM 5-qubit quantum chip we physically demonstrate the theoretical connection between delocalization and entanglement. We obtain a phase space plot of time-averaged entanglement in the deep quantum regime, which surprisingly reflects the classical phase space structure. Since chaos is known to generate entanglement in the quantum kicked top, our proposed method could be useful in Quantum Information Processing.

Quantum Simulation of the Quantum Kicked Top

Simple Measurement for Field Reconstruction

The temporal resolution of pump-probe experiments is determined by the duration of the excitation and measurement pulses. A major constraint on femtosecond ($1$ fs = $10^{-15}$ s) and attosecond ($1$ as = $10^{-18}$ s) science is how well we can control and compress these pulses. However, such ultrashort pulses require a broad spectrum with careful phase control across its bandwidth to minimize the duration. The temporal characterization of these pulses is crucial in establishing ultrafast experiments. For this reason, several pulse characterizing techniques have been developed, each with their own strengths and weaknesses [1].

In this paper, we discuss a new optical measurement technique that can directly measure the electric field that constitutes the laser pulse. We find that compared to other techniques for electric field measurements, our method is relatively inexpensive and robust in characterizing pulses up to 100 fs in duration. This method requires only a commercially available CCD camera as opposed to spectrometers or other expensive instruments and provides the ability to reconstruct the field without ambiguities [2]. In this way, we can directly measure the temporal evolution of the field amplitude and phase [3]. We find that the measurement is in good agreement with established characterization techniques.

References

[1] J. C. Diels and W. Rudolph. Ultrashort Laser Pulse Phenomena, chapter Diagnostic Techniques,pages 452–466. Elsevier, 2006.

[2] T. J. Hammond, A. Korobenko, Y. Naumov, M. Villeneuve, P. B. Corkum and D. H. Ko. Near-field imaging for single-shot wave form measurements.Journal of Physics, 51, February 2018

[3] E. Goulielmakis, M. Uiberacker, R. Kienberger, A. Baltuska, V. Yakovlev, A. Scrinzi, T. West-erwalbesloh, U. Kleineberg, U. Heinzmann, M. Drescher and F. Krausz. Direct measurement of light waves.Science, 305(5688):1267–1269, August 2004.

Simple Measurement for Field Reconstruction

Trapped ions can offer a functional platform for quantum simulation of many-body Hamiltonians modeled by spin-systems. Programmable, arbitrary and precise control over each ion is required in order to tune ion-ion interactions, which translate to diverse parameters of the system under study. Current technologies suffer from scalability issues to large ion chains, and from ``cross-talk'' due to micron-level inter-ion separation. Here, we report our development of a holographic optical ion-addressing setup for Yb$^+$ ions ($\lambda = 369.5$ nm) using a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). This technique uses a reprogrammable hologram to modulate the wavefront of the addressing beam and thus engineer the amplitude and phase profile of light across the ion ensemble to better than $\lambda/20$. We implement a novel Iterative Fourier Transform Algorithm (IFTA) to compute the desired hologram. This algorithm efficiently compensates for optical aberrations and produces $<10^{-4}$ intensity cross-talk error in arbitrary pair-wise addressing profiles, suitable for over fifty ions. This scheme relies on standard commercial hardware, can be readily extended to over a hundred ions, and adapted to other ion-species and quantum platforms. Such high-precision optical control will enable the simulation of arbitrary and dynamic lattice geometries of spins to be realized in a 1D chain of ions. This technique will also allow us to investigate problems in quantum quench, quantum phase transitions, and physics of higher dimensional systems such as the creation of topological states. 

We acknowledge financial support from University of Waterloo, US ARO, NSERC Discovery and NFRF grants, TQT (CFREF), and the Ontario Government.

Holographic optical manipulation of trapped ions for quantum simulation

Development of portable X-ray fluorescence devices has made it easier to quickly assess trace elements such as zinc in human tissue. Zinc deficiency can have serious implications on growth and development of the human body. From recent studies zinc content in nail clippings has been suggested to be an effective biomarker for zinc status. In this study, a simulation approach was used to investigate the use of a portable X-ray fluorescence system for detecting the variation of zinc signal with respect to nail thickness and was compared with the experimental results. The portable X-ray device was modelled using the available information from the manufacturer using the TOPAS Monte Carlo code (Geant4 simulation software).The simulations were carried out for varying nail phantom thickness (0.2 mm – 1.2 mm) with concentration of 1000 ppm zinc. Each simulation was run for 10^9 histories and the statistical uncertainty was less than 3.5%. The obtained energy spectra from different measurements were analyzed and three different normalization techniques (Coherent, Compton and Entire) spectrum were investigated to account for the variation of sample interrogated by the X-ray beam. Close agreement between simulation and experimental trends were observed indicating successful benchmarking of the simulation. Compton and Coherent normalization followed a slightly negative trend. One other important observation was coherent normalization can be a robust normalization procedure to improve the accuracy of elemental quantification in order to reduce the variability in nail thickness by ~8%. Overall the simulation approach can provide additional insights into elemental analysis in keratin based nail phantoms.

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Moving toward faster measurements of micron-sized axon diameters in vivo

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