2017 SPIE President Prof. Glenn Boreman has visited University Miguel Hernandez on May 21st, 2018, as part of his visit to Spain to participate at the events of the International Day of Light. Prof. Boreman is Chair of the Department of Physics and Optical Science at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and Director of the Center for Optoelectronics & Optical Communications.
He delivered the conference How Photonics lights the world at the Politechnical School of Elche, with great success of audience of professors and students. Below, with Augusto Beléndez (Univ. Alicante), Javier Alda (Univ. Complutense) and Inmaculada Pascual (Univ. Alicante). SPIE Women in Optics planners were handed in to the young attendees to promote optics and photonics.
TecnOPTO participated again at FecitElx, the science and technology fair of Elche. On May 5th a KHET tournament was organized. This laser chess game was arranged by students of Computer Engineering of UMH. The winners received one KHET game. In the picture, Maria del Mar and the students organizing the tournament!
TecnOPTO participó de nuevo esta año en FecitElx, la feria de ciencia ay tecnología de Elche. El día 5 de mayo se organizó un torneo de KHET, el ajedrez láser. Estudiantes de Ingeniería Informática de la UMH fueron los encargados de la organización del torneo. Los ganadores fueron premiados con un juego KHET. En la foto aparecen María de Mar y los estudiantes de la UMH organizadores del torneo.
The presentation of Dr. Sirona Valdueza, researcher “Ramon y Cajal” at the Department of Electronics of University of Alcalá and former student of TecnOPTO is now available. This seminar was recorded on February 26th, 2018, in the Workshop “La Ciencia tiene nombre de mujer”
It deals with the use of liquid-crystal polymer q-plates operated at different wavelengths. We show how a broadband spectral characterization allows identifying the wavelengths with retardance values relevant for vector beam generation (π, π/2, and 3π/2). The wavelength is then used as a tuning parameter to change the device performance from the standard half-wave q-plate to a positive or a negative quarter-wave q-plate.
We present a simple procedure to derive the polarization distribution of the generated vector beams, and show that they can produce hybrid vector beams when operated at non-design wavelenths. Therefore, these results could extend the use of commercial q-plates for multicolour vector beam applications.
This work has been done in collaboration with Prof. Jeffrey A. Davis and Isaiah Abella, from San Diego State University.
Interview to Sirona Valdueza in Diario Información: Link
Sirona is a former student of TecnOPTO, and currently a «Ramón y Cajal» researcher at Univerty of Alcalá: Link to her personal web
She has been one of the speakers at the «II Jornada La Ciencia tiene Nombre de Mujer» that was held at UMH to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. In her talk she gave an overview of her experience as a young scientist in the field of photonics engineering with useful tips for girls willing to follow a career in STEM. More details on the program of this workshop can be found here.
Prof. Pascuala García Martínez becomes a Vicedean (Vicedecana de Estudios y Ordenación Académica) of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Valencia.
She is part of new team leaded by Prof. Jordi Vidal, who was elected as the new Dean of the Faculty of Physics in the elections held on March 12th, 2018.
A new paper published in Optics & Lasers in Engineering presents an experimental method to calibrate a liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) display by using split-lens configurations displayed on the device. The split-lens directly generates an interference pattern from which the phase modulation is calculated. Additionally, a micro-lens array is displayed on the LCoS, within the same experimental set-up, to implement a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor and retrieve the display surface deformation.
Our latest results on the adaptive generation and detection of vector beams by means of liquid crystal spatial light modulators were presented in the talk entitled «Polarization Diffractive Elements displayed in Liquid Crystal Spatial Light Modulators».
The workshop had very interesting talks, and a great ambience.
The II Jornada La Ciencia tiene Nombre de Mujer was held on February 26th at UMH to celebrate the International Day of Woman and Girl in Science. The purpose of this second edition is to attract female students to Engineering degrees. Recognized female Engineering professionals delivered outreach talks to an audience of about 200 high-school students. Prof. Carmen Vázquez, who talked about Photonics applications in engineering, and Dr. Sirona Valdueza, former student of TecnOPTO, were among the speakers.
After that, the attendees could experience hands-on engineering through several experimental stands, including «Velocity speed detection using Doppler effect» and «Voice transmission by laser», among others.
The members of TecnOPTO, María del Mar Sánchez and Julia Arias, helped organized this activity in collaboration with Unidad de Igualdad of UMH, and TecnOPTO PhD student Aaron Cofré gave a stand on photonics.
This work presents a new technique to encode complex-valued holograms onto a phase-only display, based on a random selection determined by the amplitude level. The proposed technique offers some interesting features like on-axis hologram reconstruction, no iterative calculation, and good efficiency and good computational cost.
We provide here experimental results with computer generated holograms, as well as the generation of Hermite-Gauss and Laguerre-Gauss beams.
