Special Issue "Photonic Sensors for Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Agent Detection"

Guest Editor
Dr. Teng K. Ooi
United States Missile Defense Agency and Office of Naval Research
E-Mail:

Guest Editor
Dr. Gary R. Pickrell
Materials Science and Engineering, Center for Photonics Technology in Electrical and Computer Engineering; and NanoBio-Materials Laboratory, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, Virginia 24061, USA
Website: http://www2.mse.vt.edu/People/Faculty/GRPickrell/tabid/537/Default.aspx
E-Mail:
Interests: photonic sensors (including fiber optic); holey fiber sensors (including RHOF-random hole fiber); gas/chemical sensors; biosensors; pressure/temperature/strain/acoustic sensors; luminsescence/interferometric/polarization/birefringence based sensors; sol-

Photonic sensors, including fiber optic sensors, have been the subject of intensive research over the last two decades for use in civil and military environments for detection of a wide variety of biological, chemical and nuclear agents. Photonic sensor designs have been developed and demonstrated that have small size, light weight, high resolution, immunity to electromagnetic interference, harsh environment operational capability, “long-reach” access potential, multiplexing capability for certain sensor designs and low cost implementation attributes. Photonic sensors can utilize different components of the optical signal such as intensity based, interferometric, polarization, spectroscopic, pulse shape or arrival time based, giving rise to a large number of different sensor designs. These differences may arise in the physical structures employed, in the optical source or detection systems, in the signal demodulation systems, or in new combinations of these. Progress in photonic sensor designs and applications continues at a fast pace with new types of optical fibers - photonic band gap fibers (PBG), microstructure optical fibers (MOF), random hole optical fibers (RHOF); and hybrid ordered random hole optical fibers (HORHOF); higher resolution, lower cost, and or expanded detection range capability for sources and detection schemes; and new signal demodulation algorithm designs. Within this rapidly advancing field, this special issue focuses on photonic sensors for chemical, biological and nuclear agent detection. I hope that this special issue will give the reader a broad overview of some of the exciting areas of photonic sensor research with this collection of innovative research articles.

fiber optic sensor; photonic sensor; nuclear detection; chemical detection; biological detection