Grupo de Tecnologías Ópticas y Optoelectrónicas

On 2015 May 21st, Maria del Mar Sánchez-López gave the seminar Optics & Photonics, the science of light and light based technology at the Department of Physics of the University of Salerno (Italy).

This seminar was part of the academic event for the Premio «Eduardo R. Caianiello», awarded for secondary school students by the International Institute for Advanced Studies (Istituto Internazionale per Gli Alti Studi Scientifici).

Announcement: LocandinaPremio-AI_premiazione

Ignacio Moreno has been awarded with a grant to visit the Department of Physics of San Diego State University for three months. This grant is financed by the from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of Spain, in the program for mobility stays for professor and researchers at foreign centers.

This stay will be performed in the period between July and September 2015.

In addition, this grant has been selected as one of the 30 recipients for 2015 of the Fulbright grant by the Fulbright commission.

We published a new paper in Optics Communications entitled «Simple spectral technique to identify the ordinary and extraordinary axes of a liquid crystal retarder«.

In this work we analyze the effective retardance changes that happens when a retarder is tilted and use this effect to easily identify the ordinary and extraordinary axes of a liquid-crystal retarder by means of a spectrometer.

This work has been done in collaboration with our colleagues Juan Campos, from UAB, and Asticio Vargas and Aaron Cofré, from UFRO (Chile).

The company Edmund Optics selected the project of a real time spectrally programmable laser source as one of the finalists of the 2014 Educational Award in the European region.

The complete list of finalists can be found in: link.

This project is inspired in our recent publication in Optics Letters entitled «Optical retarder system with programmable spectral retardance«.

Aida Sánchez Meroño succesfully defended her PhD Thesis entitled “Slow and fast light in multiple-beam interferometers, mono- and multi-layer systems” on March 26th, 2015. The thesis received the maximum mark (excellent Cum Laude). The jury was composed by Prof. Ignacio Esquivias, from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Prof. Juan Campos, from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Prof. Pedro Corredera, from CSIC, Prof. Beatriz Romero, from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and Prof. Carlos R. Fernández-Pousa, from UMH.

The thesis  has been supervised by Prof. María del Mar Sánchez and Prof. Julia Arias.

The work deals with the theorethical and experimental study of various photonic systems for the generation of slow and fast light, with potential application in sensing and high resolution interferometry. The results have been published in four papers in journals of the first JCR quartile like Applied Physics Letters, IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics and Physical Review A.

Ignacio Moreno stayed at ITO – the Institut für Technische Optik from the Universität Stuttgart in the period from 2014 November 1st until December 15th.

During this period he has been able to interact with Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Osten, ITO director, and other ITO researchers, and learn some of the new advances in optics developed by this prestigious center.

On November 12th, Ignacio gave a seminar entitled «Optics with liquid crystal SLMs at UMH-Elche: Programmable diffraction, polarization and spectral control», where he introduced the research activities that we develop at TECNOPTO.

The picture shows Ignacio with Prof. Dr. Hans Tiziani, former ITO director, during the Christmas dinner celebration.

Venancio Calero and Cristian Santiago succesfully defended their final degree Thesis in Telecommunications Engineering and in Industrial Engienering respectively, both supervised by Ignacio Moreno.

Venancio completed a work entitled «Liquid crystal spatial light modulators with high phase modulation for controlling a laser deflector», where he applied a LCoS device designed to operate with IR light to achieve large values of phase modulation with visible light. The picture shows Venancio and Ignacio at the end of the session.

Cristian  completed a work entitled «Realization of a Fourier transform optical processing system based on LCoS modulators», where he built an optical image processor system and applied different optical techniques.

We published a new paper in Optics Express entitled “Analysis of multiple internal reflections in a parallel aligned liquid crystal on silicon SLM“.

In this work we analyze multiple internal reflection effects on the optical modulation of a reflective parallel-aligned liquid-crystal on silicon (PAL-LCoS) SLM.We developed a simplified simplified physical model that quantitatively accounts for observed phenomena like some amount of coupled amplitude modulation, and a reduction of the effective phase modulation as the angle of incidence increases.

This work was a continuation of this type of studies initiated last year with our friend Asticio Vargas.

Ignacio Moreno visited the Department of Physics of San Diego State University – SDSU- from September 20th to 28th, to continue with the common projects with our friends Prof. Jeffrey A. Davis and Prof. Don. M. Cottrell.

As always, the visit has been extremely valuable and fruitful discussions and new ideas were opened.

María del Mar Sánchez and Ignacio Moreno attended the 5th International Workshop on Liquid Crystal for Photonics, held in Erice (Italy), in September 3-6, 2014.

María presented a poster with a new research entitled «Tunable slow and fast light in tunable LC interferometer», while Ignacio reviewed the works on optical vortices in a invited talk entitled «Liquid-crystal based optical vortex elements».

The LCP Workshop is always special after our organization in 2010!