Grupo de Tecnologías Ópticas y Optoelectrónicas

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.

We published a new paper in Applied Optics, entitled «Encoding high-order cylindrically polarized light beams«. Here we present a setup for the experimental production of cylindrically polarized beams, as well as other variations of polarized light beams. The optical system uses a single transmissive phase-only SLM, which is used to apply different spatial phase modulation to two output collinear R and L circularly polarized components. Different cylindrically polarized light beams can be obtained by applying different phase shifts to these two circularly polarized components.

We made this work in collaboration with Prof. Jeffrey A. Davis and Prof. Don M. Cottrell, our friends at San Diego State University, and Ramiro Donoso, our friend at Universidad de La Frontera, in Temuco.