Grupo de Tecnologías Ópticas y Optoelectrónicas

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!

We published a new paper in Optics Letters entitled «Optical retarder system with programmable spectral retardance«. In this work we demonstrate an optical system that works as a retarder waveplate with programmable spectral retardance. The input light beam is spectrally dispersed and different spectral components are projected onto different pixels of a LCoS-SLM. Then, a different retardance is addressed for each pixel, adapted to the incoming wavelength. Light reflected recombined by the same setup. In this way a programmable polarization spectrum can be encoded.

This work was initiated as part of the final degree project of Jose Carrion, and has been done in collaboration with Prof. Juan Campos, from UAB group.

María del Mar Sánchez and Ignacio Moreno stayed for two weeks at the the Optics Group of the Department of Physics, at Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), at the second half of July 2014.

The picture show us with the complete team. For right to left, Juan Campos, Andrés Márquez (from University of Alicante), Ignacio Moreno, María del Mar Sánchez, Juan Carlos Escalera, María Yzuel, Xuejie Zheng, Alba Peinado, Angel Lizana, Claudio Ramírez and Irene Estévez.

We published a new paper in Applied Optics, entitled «Flexible polarimeter architecture based on a birefringent grating“. Here we present a novel optical setup useful for polarimetric measurements. It is based on a birefringent grating displayed onto a PAL-LCoS display. The system is compact and flexible, since the size of the image can be adjusted by means of the period of the grating. The system is made fully programmable by incorporating a variable LC retarder, whose orientation and retardance are optimized by means of the condition number indicator.

We made this work in collaboration with Asticio Vargas, Fabian Torres and Ramiro Donoso, our friend at Universidad de La Frontera, in Temuco, and with our friend Prof. Juan Campos from Universtat Autònoma de Barcelona.