Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

This RTI equipment request is to purchase a 13 GHz and 100GSa/s of 2 channel digital oscilloscope from Tektronix replace a Keysight (former Agilent) DSO81204B Oscilloscope, purchased in 2006 which stopped working in April 2023. The lack of access to the high-speed digital oscilloscope resulted in the interruption of two innovative projects, which have potential to create two new classes of the ultrahigh sensitive sensors, the delay of the availability of the 13GHz digital oscilloscope will put Canada in the world leading position of two research directions on hold. (1) The random distributed feedback optical parametric oscillator sensor (RF-OPOS), it will be the 1st of its kind using frequency spectrum correlation on 1st order modulation instability spectrum and intensity detection. Impact of this research: This will be the 1st concept to use RF-OPO for sensors, especially with tunable spatial resolution and location ability for static and dynamic ultrasensitive sensing, which will be enabled by the 13GHz and 100GS/s digital oscilloscope. It will add a new class of OPO based distributed sensor. Compared with the traditional static strain or temperature fiber sensors, the proposed sensor has ultrahigh resolution with improvement of 1000x. The ultrahigh resolution makes it a powerful tool for geophysical research and applications. The delay of the access to critical 13GHz and 100GSa/s Digital Oscilloscope will lead us to miss the chance of 1st demonstration of the distributed OPO sensing. (2) The distributed exceptional point sensing based on phase matching of SBS Four-Wave-Mixing (FWM) in single mode fiber (SMF), it will be the first kind of the distributed Brillouin sensing without using Brillouin spectrum. The distributed exceptional point has effective refractive index zero, which is extremely sensitive to the local birefringence change with potential to make the distributed quantum sensing. This sensor can be used to detect eavesdrop event which makes high speed communication network lose its security and is extremely difficult to be detected due to minimum disturbance. The proposed sensor has great potential to address the eavesdrop issue at the location accuracy of of 2mm, enabled by 100Gsa/s digital scope. The proposed research will address the eavesdrop issue by distributed fiber-optic sensors, and deep-learning neural networks, through design and develop ultrahigh sensitive distributed phase matching sensors. The delay of this research will postpone the time of Canada to be in leading position in distributed quantum sensing and security of optical networks.