Photonic Sensing: Principles and Applications for Safety and Security Monitoring

Preface

Twenty-first century society places high priority on health, environment, and security; the threats of terrorism, climate change, and pollution are of increasing concern for both governments and citizens. While many of these threats can never be completely eliminated, their impact can be significantly mitigated by the presence of effective early-detection and early-warning systems. To provide such protection requires flexible, cost-effective sensing, and monitoring systems in areas such as structural integrity, environmental health, human security and health, and industrial process control. Photonics (the use of light) has the potential to provide highly effective solutions tailored to meet a broad range of specific sensing requirements, particularly, as it can leverage many of the technology platforms that were successfully developed for the communications industry. However, optimal sensing solutions require the development of specialized materials, novel optical devices, and new networking algorithms and platforms. As a sensor technology, photonics offers low power requirements, high sensitivity and selectivity, and immunity from electromagnetic interference. A single optical fiber can be used both to detect disturbances at multiple locations and to transit the information to a central point for data processing. Over the last two decades, we have seen the rapid development of photonic sensing technologies and their application in fields including food bacteria detection, ...