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 FÃsicas, Universidad de la Frontera (Chile) and our friends at Departamento de FÃsica de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This is the third paper resulting from the Thesis of the PhD student Aarón Cofré.
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:
We developed a quantitative analysis of the performance of a complete snapshot polarimeter based on a polarization diffraction grating (PDGr). The work has been published in the paper entitled Quantitative performance of a polarization diffraction grating polarimeter encoded onto two liquid-crystal-on-silicon displays, published at the journal Optics & Laser technology.
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.
This work has been developed in collaboration with our friends at the Departamento de Ciencias FÃsicas, Universidad de la Frontera (Chile) and our friends at Departamento de FÃsica de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. And it will part of the PhD Thesis of Aarón Cofré.
We published a new paper in Scientific Reports entitled Vector Beam Polarization State Spectrum Analyzer. This work has been done with our friends at San Diego State University.
In this work we present a proof of concept for a vector beam polarization state spectrum analyzer based on the combination of a polarization diffraction grating (PDG) and an encoded harmonic q-plate grating (QPG). The result is a two-dimensional polarization diffraction grating that generates six different q-plate channels with topological charges from −3 to +3 in the horizontal direction, and each is split in the vertical direction into the six polarization channels at the cardinal points of the corresponding higher-order Poincaré sphere. Consequently, 36 different channels are generated in parallel.
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.
Download the paper here