Xiaoyi Bao

Xiaoyi Bao has been a full Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa since 2000. Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Fiber Optics and Photonics (2003-2023). Her research interests include distributed fiber sensors and applications for structural health monitoring (SHM), fabrication of nanofiber device, low noise fiber lasers, nonlinear optical signal processing in high precision instrumentation and sensors.  Dr. Bao has co-authored 370+ refereed papers in journals and 270+ papers in conference proceedings, and 10 US patents, 8 technologies transferred to 7 companies in Canada, USA, and Japan.

She is a fellow of OSA and SPIE and the Royal Society of Canada, recipient of the Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize (Optica, 2023), recipient of Governor General’s Innovation Award (Rideau Hall Foundation, 2021); Canadian Association of Physicists Medals for Outstanding Achievement in Applied Physics (2010) and Applied Photonics (2013). 

Selected publications

• Bao, X., (2023). Prospects on ultrasound measurement techniques with optical fibers, Measurement Science and Technology, 34(2023), 051001(13pp). https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6501/acb5b2.
• Wang, H., Lu, P., Chen, C., Mihailov, S., Chen, L & Bao, X. (2022). Stabilizing Brillouin random laser with photon localization by feedback of distributed random fiber grating array. Optics Express, 30(12), 20712-20724. https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.460736
• Bao, X., & Wang, Y. (2021). Recent advancements in Rayleigh scattering-based distributed fiber sensors. Advanced Devices & Instrumentation, 2021. Article ID 8696571.  https://doi.org/10.34133/2021/8696571
• Bao, X., Zhou, Z., & Wang, Y. (2021). Distributed time-domain sensors based on Brillouin scattering and FWM enhanced SBS for temperature, strain and acoustic wave detection. PhotoniX, 2(1), 1-29. https://doi.org/10.1186/s43074-021-00038-w
• Pang, C., Hua, Z., Zhou, D., Zhang, H., Chen, L., Bao, X. & Dong, Y. (2020). Opto-mechanical time-domain analysis based on coherent forward stimulated Brillouin scattering probing. Optica, 7(2), 176-184. https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.381141
• Zhou, D., Dong, Y., Wang, B., Pang, C., Ba, D., Zhang, H., Lu, Z., Li, Hui., & Bao, X. (2018). Single-shot BOTDA based on an optical chirp chain probe wave for distributed ultrafast measurement. Light: Science & Applications, 7(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-018-0030-0

Dr. Bao’s research includes using quantum nonlinear effects in optical fibers to develop optical phase and polarization amplifier for ultra-weak signal detection for quantum sensing, and optical signal processing, as well as developing instrumentation to characterize the laser dynamics, noise property, optical network security monitoring, ultrasound transmitter, acoustic/optic micro-cavity, distributed fiber birefringence measurement and data storage in speciality fibers.

Her group is also working on design, fabrication of speciality fibers, structured fibers, and nano-fibers based interferometers, long period grating, random fiber gratings as the sensing probes for temperature, strain vibration, ultrasound, birefringence, refractive index, ultrasound generation and detection, optical filters, signal processing unit.

The development of the low noise fiber lasers, multi-parameter laser sensors, secret key generation and transmission, optical parametric gain oscillators, photon localization, manipulation, random number generation.

The distributed fiber sensors for infrastructure monitoring and non-destructive testing. It acts as a fibre nerve system to locate, identify deformation, hot spots (fire), predict and locate internal cracks, as well as real-time tapping events monitoring and localization in optical fiber networks, which warn the attacks by modern adversary eavesdropping techniques.