Two highly sensitive optical sensor topologies are proposed and simulated in this paper. The proposed structures are optimized to provide better performance characteristics such as sensitivity, detection limit, and quality factor. They are based on two-dimensional photonic crystals consisting of rectangular arrays of GaAs rods in SiO2 substrates. Such lattices have bandgaps for transverse magnetic modes. Two-dimensional finite difference time domain and plane wave expansion methods are used for the simulation and analysis of the refractive index sensors and particle swarm optimization method is used to optimize the structural parameters. The designed structures show a high sensitivity to refractive index variations. They are able to detect refractive indices from 1.33 to 1.5. An excellent figure of merit equal to 737 RIU−1 is observed for the proposed structure and a significant improvement is observed compared to the structures reported in the literature.

We present an alternative method to detect and measure the concentration changes in liquid solutions. The method uses Digital Holographic Interferometry (DHI) and is based on measuring refractive index variations. The first hologram is recorded when a wavefront from light comes across an ordinary cylindrical glass container filled with a liquid solution. The second hologram is recorded after slight changing the liquid’s concentration. Differences in phase obtained from the correlation of the first hologram with the second one provide information about the refractive index variation, which is directly related to the changes in physical properties related to the concentration. The method can be used − with high sensitivity, accuracy, and speed − either to detect adulterations or to measure a slight change of concentration in the order of 0.001 moles which is equivalent to a difference of 0.003 g of sodium chloride in solutions. The method also enables to measure and calculate the phase difference among each pixel of two samples. This makes it possible to generate a global measurement of the phase difference of the entire sensed region.

Local weather conditions have an impact on the availability of free-space optical (FSO) communication. The variation in meteorological parameters, such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed, leads to variations of the refractive index along the transmission path. These refractive index inhomogeneities produced by atmospheric turbulence induce optical turbulence which is responsible for random fluctuations in the intensity of the laser beam that carries the signal (irradiance) called scintillations that can significantly degrade the performance of FSO systems. This paper aims to investigate the feasibility of deploying FSO communication technology under scintillation effects in any urban region and atmospheric environment. To achieve that, firstly by utilizing the Hufnagel-Vally day with the Sadot and Kopeika models together, the scintillation strength for a specified region, Sulaimani City in north-eastern Iraq as an example, has been estimated through the calculation of the refractive index structure parameter (Cn2) over a period of 10 years and it was found to be at the strong turbulence level. Secondly, from the same estimated parameter, the scintillation attenuation of the signal carrying the laser beam intensity can be calculated to investigate the feasibility of FSO communication using Optysistem-7 software. The optimal link distance for north-eastern Iraq (Sulaimani City) has been found to be within the limit of about 5.5 km. Analysing the max. Q-factor, bit-error rate and signal to noise ratio for an average of 120 months between 2013–2022 assessed the best and worst seasons for FSO.

In this work the influence of the cavity parameters on optical losses of a simple intensity-based in-line refractive index sensor utilizing a micromachined side-hole fibre was studied by means of numerical simulations. To perform these simulations, the Authors used the finite-difference time-domain method. The proposed sensor setup consists of light source, micromachined optical fibre as a sensor head, and a detector which makes it low-cost and easy to build. The changes of the external refractive index can be, therefore, recovered by direct measurements of the transmitted intensity from which insertion loss values can be calculated. By changing geometry of the cavity micromachined into the side-hole optical fibre, it was possible to determine its influence on the final sensor sensitivity and measurements range. Based on the provided analysis of simulations results, a simple fibre optic sensor can be fabricated mainly for sensing external liquids refractive index for application in biochemistry or healthcare.