In June 2016 we received the visit of our friend Dr. Asticio Vargas, from the Department of Physical Sciences, at Universidad de La Frontera, in Temuco, Chile.
Asticio stayed for three weeks in our lab, where we have been working hard on different projects related to Solc filters and polarization.
The picture shows from right to left Asticio, with Ignacio, and two of the current PhD students, Abdelghafor Messaddi, from Algeria, and Aaron Cofré, also from Chile.
On May 18th 2016, María del Mar Sánchez participated in the II Workshop on Women in Science & Engineering, held at the Politechnical School of Experimental Sciences & Technology, at University Rey Juan Carlos (URJC), Madrid.
Organized by Prof. Beatriz Romero, from URJC, this workshop is intended to encourage women to follow a career in science or engineering.
María del Mar participated with the conference entitled «Women researchers in Light and in Light Technologies – Investigadoras en la luz y en las tecnologías de la luz».
On May 12th we participated at the Project of the Light – El projecte de la Llum that were organized at the primary school CEIP El Palmeral, in Elche. During two days, the school was devoted to all kind of activities related to the light.
We contributed in various forms. We brought panels from the exhibition Light beyond the Bulb, that were exposed in the library. In addition we brought different experiments and demonstrations of different optical phenomena. We prepared some of the students in the sixth grade to help us, and they did a great job showing the experiment to other younger students. We also brought the Khet game to play laser chess at the school.
We published a new paper in Optics Letters, entitled Nondiffracting vector beams where the charge and the polarization state vary with propagation distance. The paper appeared published in the OL issue of May 2016.
In this work we generate nondiffracting vector beams where the charge and the polarization state vary with the propagation distance. We use reflective geometry where a parallel-aligned spatial light modulator is used to spatially modulate two orthogonal linear polarizations. We encode spiral phases with equal charge but with opposite signs onto the two polarization directions to encode a vector beam and add two axicon phases. Both the charge and the phase shift between the two axicons can be varied along the focus line.
This work has been done in collaboration with our friends at San Diego State University, and was designed during the recent visit of Ignacio Moreno to SDSU in February 2016.
Ignacio Moreno gave the invited talk entitled «Photonic Technologies: Essential told for current engineering», at the XVII IEEE Spanish Student Branch Meeting, held in UMH – Elche. This meeting is organized by the IEEE Student Branchs in Spain, and this year it has been organized by the UMH IEEE Student Branch in April 7th to 10th.
During his presentation, Ignacio talked about all the possibilities that Optics & Photonics offer in the different areas of modern engineering, from fiber optics in communications, lasers of industrial applications, LEDs sources for lighting, or biomedical optical applications.
The picture shows Ignacio with Jonatan Ramón, the president of the UMH Branch, at the end of the talk, with a gift given to the speaker.
We participated at FecitElx 2016, the Science and Technology Fair of Elche, organized by our university. This is the second edition of this fair, and this year we contributed with three different events:
1) We showed again our demonstration workshop, where we made different experiments on optics. Kids and paterents enjoyed with us on Friday and Saturday morning at the Elche Congress Center.
2) We brought two exhibitions: Light beyond the bulb, and Women in Light Science and Light Technologies.
3) Finally, we organized a game of laser chess: the KHET tournement. In the picture you can see of the players.
It was a lot of fun!
We published a new paper in Optical Engineering Letters, entitled Generation of vector beams at 1550 nm telecommunications wavelength using a segmented q-plate. The paper appeared published in the third issue of OE journal in 2016.
In this work we present the use of a q-plate device operating at the 1550 nm telecommunications wavelength. A prototype liquid-crystal device from Citizen Holdings Co. is demonstrated to be useful for the generation of vector beams and orbital angular momentum transfer at this important wavelength.
The device was developed for a visible wavelength, but we show here that it can be applied also for the 1550 nm wavelength, where is of interest to apply such devices to multiplex data with OAM channels.
This work was initiated during the stay of María M. Sanchez-López and Ignacio Moreno at SDSU during Summer 2015.
Ignacio Moreno presents an invited communication at the meeting SPIE Photonics Europe held in Brussels in April 2016.
The communication is entitled “Production of arbitrary polarized light beams with a liquid crystal spatial modulator”, and it was presented within the session Optical Micro- and Nanometrology. This communication reviews our recent advances in the design of polarization diffractive optical elements encoded onto a spatial light modulador system.
The paper Nondiffracting Bessel beams with polarization state that varies with propagation distance that we published in Optics Letters last year has been selected in the section SPOTLIGHT ON OPTICS by OSA – the Optical Society of America, specifically in the section devoted to Optical Design and Instrumentation.
This section of the OSA website selects highlighted articles from OSA journals. Our paper in Optics Letters has been receiving considerable impact, since it was for three consecutive months in the TOP10 downloaded papers in the journal.
We published a new paper in Optics Letters entitled Generation of integer and fractional vector beams with q-plates encoded onto a spatial light modulator. The paper appeared published in the sixth issue of OL in 2016.
In this paper we generated programmable vector beams with arbitrary -plates encoded using a spatial light modulator system. Consequently, we have been able to analyze new and exotic -plate designs without the difficulty of fabricating individual plates. For instance, we showed experimental results for positive and negative integer and new fractional vector beam values.
For instance, the picture shows a fractional vector beam where the polarization changes linearly in three sectors along the polar coordinate in the plane traversal to the beam.
This work has been done during the stay of María M. Sanchez-López and Ignacio Moreno at SDSU during Summer 2015.