MarÃa 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.
On Friday July 7th, Marcos Maestre, student of Telecommunications Engineering, has defended his Final Degree Project entitled «Control de Pulsos Ópticos en Fibra y Medida de Efectos de Luz Lenta y Luz Rápida en Interferómetros«.
In this work, an instrumental system and its control software has been developed in order to characterize electro-optical modulators and polarization interferometers based on birefringent fibers. Using this setup slow and fast light (SFL) effects have been demonstrated for optical pulses centered at 1550 nm.
The project, which has been supervised by Julia Arias and MarÃa del Mar Sánchez-López, has obtained the maximum qualification, with honours.
A related communication will be presented at OPTOEL2017 – the Spanish Meeting on Optoelectronics.
Pascuala Garcia presented the communication entitled «On axis programmable microscope using liquid crystal spatial light modulator» at the SPIE Optical Metrology Conference, held in Munich in June 25th to 29th, 2007.
In her presentation, she showed an optical microscope system we have developed, that includes an LCOS SLM display to perform opto-digital filtering on-axis. We use a Hamamatsu SLM, free of flickering, which can be tuned to fully eliminate the zero order component of the encoded diffractive filter, therefore making use of the full space-bandwidth. The system was demonstrated by implementing different optical processing operations based on phase-only gratings such as phase-contrast, band-pass filtering, additive and subtractive imaging, or Differential Interference Contrast (DIC) imaging.
A related manuscript is available at the SPIE Proceedings in Optical Methods for Inspection, Characterization, and Imaging of Biomaterials III, edited by Pietro Ferraro, Simonetta Grilli, Monika Ritsch-Marte, Christoph K. Hitzenberger, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 10333, 103330Q (2017). Link
MarÃa del Mar Sánchez presented the last activities in outreach & education in photonics developed by our group at the 1ª Jornada de Innovación Colaborativa de la UMH (1st UMH Workshop on Collaborative Innovation) held in Elche on the 20th of June, 2017. This workshop gathered educators of Elementary Schools, Hight Schools, and Universities.
The presentation, entitled «La divulgación como instrumento de innovación educativa: el caso de la Fotónica» (in Spanish), can be viewed at the following link:
The PDGr is generated in a common path polarization interferometer with a Z optical architecture that uses two liquid-crystal on silicon (LCoS) displays. The programmable PDGr is capable to act as a simultaneous polarization state generator (PSG), yielding diffraction orders with different states of polarization. The same system is also shown to operate as a polarization state analyzer (PSA), therefore useful for the realization of a snapshot polarimeter. We analyze its performance using quantitative metrics such as the conditional number.
We show that this system can be used as a vector beam polarization state spectrum analyzer, where both the topological charge and the state of polarization of an input vector beam can be simultaneously determined in a single experiment.
This work has been developed at the Department of Physics of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, with the participation of Ignacio Moreno.
It demonstrates a polarization gating method based on the experimentally measured Mueller matrices. Polarization gating refers to a collection of imaging methods based on the combination of different controlled polarization channels. Here, first the Mueller matrix is characterized, and then employed to evaluate different polarization channels. The methodology is applied on different biological samples.
We were very pleased that Prof. Kristiaan Neyts, Head of the Liquid Crystals and Photonics Group from the Ghent University, accepted our invitation to come to Elche and impart a seminar on liquid crystals in the frame of the 3rd TECNIT PhD Workshop of our university, held in March 29th.
Ignacio Moreno became the President of SEDOPTICAÂ –Â the Spanish Society of Optics. After three years as Vicepresident, he now becomes the President of the society for the period of the next three years.
SEDOPTICA joins researchers, academia and professionals of the area of Optics & Photonics in Spain.
During this period SEDOPTICA will reach its 50th anniversary in 2018.
We published a new paper in Journal of Optics entitled Solc filters in a reflective geometry. It presents the realization of  birefringent Solc type filter in a reflective geometry.
This geometry reduces by half the number of required retarders, ensures the same spectral retardance function in pairs of retarders. The key element is a quarter-wave Fresnel rhomb located in between the set of retarders and a mirror. We present two cases, one with multiple-order quartz retarders, and a second one that uses two liquid-crystal retarders, this last one being therefore tunable.
This is the second paper in the PhD Thesis of Abdelgahfour Messaaddi, and it has been done in collboration with our friend Asticio Vargas form Universidad de La Frontera , Temuco (Chile) and our friend Noureddine Bennis and his coworkers at the Military University of Technology, Warsaw (Poland).
MarÃa 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.
