Analysis and Correction of the Additive Phase Effect Generated by Power Change in a Mach–Zehnder Interferometer Integrated to an Optical Trap

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I am familiar with this effect, and the authors made an important contribution to the field. Therefore, I believe the paper should be accepted as is. 

 

As a minor comments, I would suggest that the authors could add a sentence or two why compensating the phase off-set is important and why not doing this digitally). 

 

Overall, great work. 

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

I wanted to express my sincere gratitude for taking the time to review our manuscript with ID: applsci-2869714 submitted to the Applied Sciences Journal. Your insightful comments and constructive feedback have been invaluable in improving the quality and clarity of our work. We truly appreciate your dedication and commitment to the peer-review process, which plays a vital role in advancing scientific knowledge.

Below, we provide our response to each comment point-by-point and in the attached file (manuscript_modified) is the manuscript considering your comments. To facilitate readability, we have designated a color code, highlighting the changes by attending to your comments in green letters.

 

Reviewer: I am familiar with this effect, and the authors made an important contribution to the field. Therefore, I believe the paper should be accepted as is.

• As a minor comments, I would suggest that the authors could add a sentence or two why compensating the phase off-set is important and why not doing this digitally).
• Thanks for the reviewer’s comment. In response to this comment, the next sentence was added in line 545-547 in the reviewed version: "In the case of a proper digital correction, the laser characteristics and the oil response to its exposure must to be known.".

 

Thank you once again for your valuable contribution.

 

Best regards,

 

Azael Domínguez (Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, A.C.)

Juan Rayas (Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, A.C.)

Amalia Martínez (Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, A.C.)

and

Raúl Cordero (Universidad de Santiago de Chile)

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper studies the additive phase effect caused by the power change of Machzender interferometer with integrated optical trap. The paper has good innovation and good readability. On the whole, I hold a positive opinion on the article, but there are some problems that I hope can be corrected:

 

The first is the drawing, the author has some pictures in the drawing is not detailed enough, for example, the ruler in figure 20 and the numbers in the figure are covered, figure 18 also has a similar problem, which affects the perception.

Second, the clarity of the picture needs to be improved.

Thirdly, I personally think that in the previous introduction, the author did not give a good introduction to the innovation of this paper. A paper should emphasize its innovation, which should be obvious and clear. I hope the author can explain the core difference between himself and his predecessors in the introduction and conclusion. Admittedly, using numeric labels can be a good choice.

Finally, I still have some questions about the processing of some data in the article. The amount of data is small, such as the fitting data graph in Figure 10, which has problems.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

I wanted to express my sincere gratitude for taking the time to review our manuscript with ID: applsci-2869714 submitted to the Applied Sciences Journal. Your insightful comments and constructive feedback have been invaluable in improving the quality and clarity of our work. We truly appreciate your dedication and commitment to the peer-review process, which plays a vital role in advancing scientific knowledge.

Below, we provide our response to each comment point-by-point and in the attached file (manuscript_modified) is the manuscript considering your comments. To facilitate readability, we have designated a color code, highlighting the changes by attending to your comments in blue letters.

 

Reviewer: This paper studies the additive phase effect caused by the power change of Machzender interferometer with integrated optical trap. The paper has good innovation and good readability. On the whole, I hold a positive opinion on the article, but there are some problems that I hope can be corrected:

• The first is the drawing, the author has some pictures in the drawing is not detailed enough, for example, the ruler in figure 20 and the numbers in the figure are covered, figure 18 also has a similar problem, which affects the perception.
• Thanks for the reviewer’s comment. In attention to your comment, the figures have been redrawn to improve their perception.

 

• Second, the clarity of the picture needs to be improved.
• Thanks for the reviewer’s comment. In attention to your comment, the figures have been redrawn to improve their clarity.

 

• Thirdly, I personally think that in the previous introduction, the author did not give a good introduction to the innovation of this paper. A paper should emphasize its innovation, which should be obvious and clear. I hope the author can explain the core difference between himself and his predecessors in the introduction and conclusion. Admittedly, using numeric labels can be a good choice.
• Thanks for the reviewer’s comment. Considering your comment, in order to emphasize the innovation of this work, the paragraph in the introduction was rewritten from:

“However, to the knowledge of the authors of this work, no reports have been found in literature that a change in the laser beam power of an optical trap generates any change in the phase of the wavefronts that are transmitted by the optical elements of the same trap. In this work, a conventional optical trap is combined with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, where independent laser sources that share several optical components are used. Among the shared elements is the oil immersion objective, which generates the optical trap; in section 2, the systems are described separately, and then, their coupled implementation. In preliminary experiments, it was detected that upon changing the power of either one of the two laser sources, the interferograms showed an additive phase shift; the cause and mechanism of this effect were unknown at the time. This manuscript presents a methodology to measure and correct the contribution of such additive phase, due to some component from the optical tweezers or the interferometer, discarding that it be due to a direct contribution of the sample under study.”

 

To the text from line 85 to 98:

“(…). However, to the knowledge of the authors of this work, no reports have been found in literature that a change in the laser beam power of an optical trap generates any change in the phase of the wavefronts that are transmitted by the optical elements of the same trap.

In this work, a conventional optical trap is combined with a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, where independent laser sources that share several optical components are used. Among the shared elements is the oil immersion objective, which generates the optical trap; in section 2, the systems are described separately, and then, their coupled implementation. In preliminary experiments, it was detected that upon changing the power of either one of the two laser sources, the interferograms showed an additive phase shift; the cause and mechanism of this effect were unknown at the time. This manuscript presents a methodology to measure and correct the contribution of such additive phase, due to some component from the optical tweezers or the interferometer, discarding that it be due to a direct contribution of the sample under study.”

 

• Finally, I still have some questions about the processing of some data in the article. The amount of data is small, such as the fitting data graph in Figure 10, which has problems.
• Thanks for the reviewer’s comment. Answering your comment, the purpose of the experiment was to isolate the temperature measurements from other variables, so direct measurement was implemented through a low-cost thermocouple (the only instrument within our reach). The amount of experimental data is small given the conditions: the mechanical mount resolution that positions the thermocouple, thermocouple size, thermocouple sensitivity and container diameter. However, a good repeatability was obtained.

 

Thank you once again for your valuable contribution.

 

Best regards,

 

Azael Domínguez (Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, A.C.)

Juan Rayas (Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, A.C.)

Amalia Martínez (Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, A.C.)

and

Raúl Cordero (Universidad de Santiago de Chile)

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors presented a method to measure and correct the phase change of an optical trap during it is heated by an IR-laser.

Unfortunately, it does not become clear what can be an application for this approach espacially for optical traps.

The authors should explain why the power of the IR laser used here is much higher compared to optical traps used in the literature.

p. 7: The authors should briefly explain how the phase change is corellated to an intensity change in their work.

Fig. 4: Why is there a change in the medium air? If the phase change belongs only to the temperature increase as written in [23], the phase/intensity corellation should be constant in air.

Fig. 5: Why does the authors did not use the same laser IR laser for excitation as before?

p. 8: The additional angle can also be avoided by using a suitable filter in front of the camera.

Fig. 6: For nearly each experimtent the boundary conditions changed, only air, only glass, glass-water-glass and glass-oil-glass.
Why didn't the authors keep the conditions consistent with the two glass slides?

Fig. 6: The values on the axis shows a very high accuracy. Is the accuracy of the system really 0.000001? Otherwise adapt the y-axis. Also an error evaluation might be helpful here.

Fig. 9: How does the authors distinguish between a heated medium an that the thermocouler is heated directly by the laser? Here, an error analysis makes also sense to estimate the accuracy of the temperature.

Fig. 7/9/11/14 have no good quality. The lines are too thin

Fig. 9: Why is the temperature distribution not symmetric around the peak position?

Fig. 10: Also some uncertainties should be added. There are no measurement points for the "most important" area of the graph. There might be a lot of functions which fit to the added points. This should be discussed by the authors.

Fig.12: The authors measured the volume changes with a Michelson interferometer. Is it possible to use these values in combination with the thermal expansion coefficients of the material to determine the temperature and compare that with the previous measurement?

Fig.17: Why did the authors measured a painted area on the glass slide? What's the corellation to the other experiments?

p.15 l.492: Why did the authors start with a damage analysis? The title of the paper says to investigate the phase effect generated by a power change in a MZI integrated to an optical trap. The last sections in this papers do not belong to this topic anymore.

The caption of the figures should contain much more information. A two word caption (Fig. 20) is not sufficient.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The submitted work reads more like a report of experiments. The authors did a lot of different investigations but missed to conclude all the results in a good way to close the loop main topic promised by the title.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors replied to all comments from the reviewers very well and improved my understanding of the topic by answering the questions.