Two-dimensional filtering in the Fourier domain of transient grating coherent artifacts in time-resolved spectroscopy.

Removal of coherent artifacts is important in the analysis of time and wavelength resolved spectroscopy data. By taking advantage of the strong correlation between spectra acquired sequentially in time, artifact removal can be formulated as a 2D problem for improved effectiveness. This paper proposes a 2D method to remove transient grating coherent artifacts from femtosecond time-resolved spectroscopy data based on filtering in the Fourier domain, leading to better estimation of the material parameters from the measured data. The method is simple, intuitive, and light on computation resources. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated with experimental data acquired from a bare gold film with and without coherent artifacts using mutually parallel and perpendicular pump/probe polarizations, as well as with more complex samples (nanostructured gold film on a glass substrate and rhodamine fluorophores in solution). The proposed method is expected to be applicable to coherent artifact removal in other types of time and wavelength-resolved spectroscopy data.

Strain-induced effects in colloidal quantum dots: lifetime measurements and blinking statistics.

A series of samples of CdSe/Cd(x)Zn(1-x)S core/shell quantum dots have been synthesized in order to measure the influence of lattice-mismatch-induced strain on the photoluminescence (PL) and blinking behaviour. The PL spectra show a significant variation of the fluorescence wavelength even though the colloidal quantum dots (cQDs) are similar in size. The PL excitation spectra show a gradual splitting of the first exciton level as the proportion of Zn is increased in the shell and as the shell grows. On the other hand, blinking studies clearly demonstrate a significant dependence on the amount of Zn present in the shell. Distributions of on and off times go from the usual power-law distributions to power-law distributions with exponential cut-offs. These cut-offs become increasingly pronounced as the proportion of Zn increases. We interpret these results in the framework of diffusion-controlled electron transfer. Exciton relaxation lifetime measurements strongly suggest that lattice mismatch is responsible for a greater number of defects in core/shell cQDs. Therefore, strain and lattice mismatch are shown to be parameters of significant importance for the electronic structure of nanocrystals, influencing the photoluminescence, exciton relaxation lifetime and blinking behaviour.

Strain measurement in biaxially loaded inhomogeneous, anisotropic elastic membranes.

This paper considers the problem of measuring the strain field in biaxially loaded elastic membranes, such as soft biological tissue. Cross-correlation of intrinsic or applied speckle patterns were used to calculate the 2D displacements of small regions on the surface of a deforming membrane. This method was able to resolve 2D displacements to within a twentieth of a pixel. A finite-element model with bicubic-Hermite interpolation was used to represent the geometry of the membrane in the undeformed state. This model was fitted to the measured displacements to obtain the geometry of the membrane in the deformed state, and the strain field was calculated from the change in geometry. The strain fields were measured in both an inhomogeneous isotropic rubber membrane and a section of sheep diaphragm.

Instrumentation and procedures for estimating the constitutive parameters of inhomogeneous elastic membranes.

This study presents a method for estimating the spatial variations in material properties of elastic membranes, such as biological tissue, which contain both inhomogeneous strain fields and inhomogeneous material properties. In order to validate the method, an inhomogeneous, isotropic rubber membrane was biaxially loaded to obtain a set of states. A neo-Hookean finite element model, together with the measured strains, was used to estimate the material parameters by minimizing the residuals between the measured and modelled residual on surface tractions.

Large deformation mechanical testing of biological membranes using speckle interferometry in transmission. I: Experimental apparatus.

This paper describes an apparatus designed to study large mechanical deformations in biological membranes. The task of mechanically characterizing biological membranes is challenging because of the anisotropic and nonlinear nature of their material properties. The apparatus described here is well suited to the task because it uses speckle interferometry to measure in-plane displacements in a distributed fashion and has multiple degrees of freedom in the applied stress mechanism. In this way few a priori assumptions or restrictions are imposed on the applied stress and strain fields. The interferometer operates in transmission mode to increase the light efficiency of the system since the sample biological membranes are translucent and reflect little light. The experimental results confirm that the strain fields in the biological membranes that are generated in the experiments are highly nonuniform and cannot be properly estimated from a small number of point measurements.

Large deformation mechanical testing of biological membranes using speckle interferometry in transmission. II: Finite element modeling.

In holography and speckle interferometry the measurement range is generally limited by the greatest number of fringes that can be resolved in a single image. As a result these techniques have been generally confined to small displacement measurement applications. In the case of out-of-plane measurements one can overcome this limitation by simply adding incremental measurements at individual detector pixels. In the case of in-plane measurements, however, summing incremental measurements is not a straightforward procedure since the interference pattern moves laterally across the detector as the material deforms. We describe a modeling technique based on finite elements which solves this problem. In combination with a full field method such as holography or speckle interferometry, it provides a very sensitive measurement technique with dense spatial sampling and large dynamic range. Experimental results of speckle interferometry operating in transmission to measure in-plane displacements of biological membranes are presented, where total material displacements are of the order of millimeters. The results also demonstrate how the finite strain tensor is calculated analytically from the data at any point on the material.

Robust phase-unwrapping method for phase images with high noise content.

We present a robust method of phase unwrapping that was designed for use on noisy phase images with arbitrary fringe patterns. The method proceeds by first identifying distinct regions between fringe boundaries in an image and then phase shifting the regions with respect to one another by multiples of 2π to unwrap the phase. Image pixels are segmented between interfringe and fringe boundary areas by fitting a plane model using least squares to overlapping domains centered on all pixels. The method is tolerant of fringe gradient degradation caused by noise, filtering artifacts, and finite instrumentation bandwidth.