Grupo de Tecnologías Ópticas y Optoelectrónicas

Our former student Venacio Calero, presented his PhD Thesis entitled «Antenne à cristal photonique électro-optique pour la détection de fréquences électromagnétiques», supervised by María Pilar Bernal and Nadège Courjal at the FEMTO-ST Institute, in Besançon (France), on December 19th, 2017.

Ignacio Moreno attended the defense and participated as a member of the jury.

We participated in a new paper published in Journal of Biophotonics entitled Polarimetric imaging of biological tissues based on the indices of polarimetric purity.

This work has been developed by our friends at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in the frame of the common coordinated collaboration project.

In this work we use the indices of polarimetric purity (IPPs) for the inspection of biological tissues.

Compared with standard polarimetric images of biological samples, IPP-based images lead to larger image contrast of some biological structures and to a further physical interpretation of the depolarizing mechanisms inherent to the samples.

TecnOPTO has been granted with a PROMETEO project from Generalitat Valenciana. Link

The project, entitled Development of vectorial and polarimetric optical instrumentation, will be focused on the realization of advanced optical instruments for the generation, control and application of vector beams, and is leaded by María del Mar Sánchez-López.

The astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell, who discovered pulsars, has been invested Doctor Honoris Causa at University of Valencia in November 10th, 2017.

Pascuala Garcia, who promoted this recognition through the Faculty of Physics, read the Laudatio.

In 2015, Jocelyn Bell delivered a conference at the Faculty of Physics of University of Valencia, in the series of seminars coordinated by Pascuala Garcia. Together with this event, Jocelyn Bell visited the exhibition ‘Women in Light Science’, where she is one of the twelve honoured women scientists.

Jocelyn Bell’s speech (in Valencian)

Pascuala Garcia’s Laudatio (in Valencian)

Speech of the Rector of University of Valencia (in Valencian)

More on this news (in Spanish)

A new paper entitled Multichannel polarization imaging with a polarizing diffraction grating has been published in Optical Engineering. The work has been done in collaboration with our friends at the Department of Physics at San Diego State University (SDSU).

The work demonstrates a method to generate multiple imaging with polarization state diversity, based on the use of  a polarization diffraction grating design. The polarization grating is demonstrated in an SLM-based optical system developed at SDSU. We demonstrate the generation of six diffraction orders that encode six different polarization transformations. This technique can be useful for producing single-shot imaging polarimeters.

In 2017, October 23th and 24th, Pascuala Garcia passed her last exam for the promotion to Full Professor of Optics at the Department of Optics & Optometry & Vision Sciences, of the University of Valencia.

The picture shows Pascuala with the members of the jury, at the end of the session.

Ilice Photonics, a spin-off company promoted by Daniel Puerto with Ignacio Moreno, started its activities in October 2017.

The company is devoted to develop projects in Optics & Photonics, and it is located at the UMH Scientific Park. Link

The picture shows Daniel Puerto with Prof. Jesús Pastor, Rector  of UMH, Prof. Manuel Jordán, Vicerector for Research & Innovation, and Tonia Salinas, Director of the Scientific Park, after the constitution of the company.

The SPIE Gender Equity Task Force was formed to identify how the professional environment of the optics and photonics community can better enable equal opportunities, rewards, and recognition for its members, independent of gender.

This year, Maria del Mar was one of the 16 professionals interviewed for the 2017 edition. The survey is the largest of its kind in the optics and photonics community, receiving nearly 10,000 valid responses and representing 105 countries and a wide range of disciplines. The results of this study can be download at the following link.

We published a new paper in Optics Express where we report the realization of polarization sensitive split lens configurations. We propose and demonstrate the generalization of the split lens concept to vectorial split lenses, leading to light patterns with customized intensity and state of polarization. We demonstrate how these polarization split lenses can be experimentally implemented by means of an optical system using two liquid crystal spatial light modulators, each one phase modulating one orthogonal polarization component.

The proposed technique is a simple method to generate structured light beams with polarization diversity, with potential applications in polarimetry, customized illuminators or quantum optics.

This work has been published in Optics Express, entitled Dual polarization split lenses. The work has been developed in collaboration with our friends at the Departamento de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad de la Frontera (Chile) and our friends at Departamento de Física de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This is the third paper resulting from the Thesis of the PhD student Aarón Cofré.

María del Mar Sanchez gave a talk about the generation of vectors beams with q-plate devices at the Meeting of the Royal Spanish Physical Society held in Santiago de Compostela in July 2017, 17th-21st, within the Symposium of Quantum & Non-linear Optics.

In this presentation, Maria del Mar reviewed some of our recent works. In the first part of the talk she presented the  performance of q-plates, and their combination to build other effective q-plates. In the second part she described the  implementation of q-plates on spatial light modulators, as well as their combination with axicon elements to create vector Bessel beams where both the topological charge and the polarization state vary upon propagation.