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    • Gail Overton

    G Overton Original 5d07a0c0e5eb9
    Senior Editor (2004-2020)

    Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.

    (Image credit: Bar-Ilan University)
    The cladding-mode fiber-optic sensor is demonstrated, in which the strength of coupling between core and cladding mode is shown as a function of position along 2 m of a bare standard fiber and fine-tuning of the optical frequency of a readout probe wave (a). Most of the fiber is kept in air; the frequency of strongest coupling at that point is noted as zero for convenience. Two short sections of fiber, each 8 cm long, are immersed in ethanol and water (see legend at the top of the panel); the two sections stand out. The frequencies of core-cladding coupling are offset by 3 GHz and 2 GHz, respectively, in agreement with calculations. The (b) image is the same as (a), but with the ethanol allowed to evaporate. The frequency of coupling at that point returns to its baseline value of the fiber in air. Measured (red) and calculated (blue) discrete spectra of coupling from the core mode to a series of different cladding modes (c).
    Fiber Optics

    Dynamic reconfigurable gratings create new cladding-based fiber sensor

    Gail Overton
    May 19, 2020
    Instead of depending on fixed-position fiber Bragg gratings, core-launched laser light can couple to the cladding modes of standard fiber through Brillouin dynamic gratings and...
    (Image credit: Harbin University)
    In the two-beam pumping experiment (a), two beams are spatially detuned with a distance d < 2R, being shifted temporally with a delay time τ. The insets show the far-field emission patterns from the perovskite metasurface under both symmetric and asymmetric excitations. In the transition from a BIC microlaser to a linearly polarized (LP) laser (b), I1,2 are the intensities at the marked regions in the inset to (a). Insets show the corresponding beam profiles. The reverse transition is also shown from LP to BIC microlaser (c). Finally, the transition from a donut beam to a two-lobe beam and back within a few picoseconds is shown (d); red curves are guiding lines for the calculation of the transition time.
    Lasers & Sources

    Bound states in the continuum (BIC) microlasers reach ultrafast switching speeds

    Gail Overton
    April 14, 2020
    By creating a high-quality cavity without the typical physical confinement, BIC microlasers with highly directional output and single-mode operation are breaking the tradeoff ...
    CC0 Public Domain
    The capabilities of hollow-core optical fiber are advancing at a rapid pace and may soon rival those of solid-core optical fibers.
    Fiber Optics

    Hollow-core optical fiber rapidly closing in on solid-core transmission specifications

    Gail Overton
    March 30, 2020
    The University of Southampton is among the scientific groups advancing the capabilities of hollow-core fiber as it closes in on solid-core fiber parameters.