Grupo de Tecnologías Ópticas y Optoelectrónicas

We had the pleasure to receive the visit of Dr. Tomás Belenguer Dávila, head of the Space Optical Instrumentation of INTA – Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial.

The visit of Dr. Belenguer was part of his participation in the TECNIT PhD Program Workshop, where he delivered a presentation about his activities, entitled Optical instrumentation in space missions. The presentation can be viewed at the following link:

A new publication of our team is available at the journal Optics & Lasers in Engineering, entitled Efficient on-axis engineering of optical vector modes.

In this work we present a method for the efficient experimental generation of arbitrary polarized vector beam modes. The optical system employs two LCOS-SLMs in a common path architecture, avoiding the use of beam-splitters.

We apply a recently proposed random technique to encode complex amplitude values. This encoding technique reconstructs the complex function on-axis, thus avoiding incorporating carrier phases. We demonstrate arbitrary scalar modes encoded onto orthogonal polarization components, whose superposition results in a vector beam mode.

The women of TecnOPTO attended the First Workshop of Women, Optics & Photonics in Spain, organized by the Area of Women, Optics & Photonics of SEDOPTICA.

Pascuala García participated in the round table as the President of the Group of Women in Physics of the of the Spanish Royal Society of Physics – RSEF.

María del Mar Sánchez and Guadalupe López also attended the workshop organized by the Area of Women, Optics and Photonics of SEDOPTICA.

The picture shows all the attendees to the workshop.

A special section on Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs) – Devices and Applications will be published in the journal Optical Engineering. Ignacio Moreno and María Del Mar Sanchez-Lopez are Guest Editors of this special section of the journal, together with Prof. Andrew Forbes and Prof. Yoshio Hayasaky.

The following link leads to the journal Call for Papers.

The deadline for submitting papers is October 15th, 2019. See here the flyer of the OE special section on SLMs. 

María del Mar Sánchez-López visited the Group of Optics of the University Jaume I de Castellón (GROC-UJI) to participate as a member of the jury of the Doctoral Thesis of Yessenia Jauregui Sanchez, supervised by Prof. Jesús Lancis and Prof. Enrique Tajahuerce.

Excellent work on single-pixel cameras and imaging through scattering media!

Pascuala García, María del Mar Sánchez, and David Marco attended the Bienal de Física, the biannual Spanish meeting of Physics, organized in Zaragoza by the Spanish Royal Physics Society(RSEF) (link)

David presented the poster entitled «Parallel generation of vortex beams with a 2D optical triplicator geometric phase design» in the Symposium of Quantum Optics (see here the related publication). And Pascuala presented the flash talk entitled «Highly efficient generation of arbitrary vector beams» in the Symposium of Applied Photonics (see here the related publication).

Pascuala also organized and chaired the session of Women in Physics, where María del Mar gave a talk on the activity promoting women in STEM entitled «Jornadas La Ciencia tiene nombre de Mujer de la Universidad Miguel Hernández».

Here you can see Ignacio Moreno’s talk about Optics & Photonics at the Day of Light, the workshop organized  by COSCE – the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies on June 6th, 2019.

You can access the complete workshop at the following link

COSCE – the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies organized in June 6th a workshop to commemorate the Day of Light. Ignacio Moreno participated as President of SEDOPTICA, the Spanish Society of Optics. More information at: link

In the next video you can see a report recorded by UNED – the Spanish National University of Distance Education, which has bee broadcast at TVE2.

In his talk entitled «Two-dimensional geometric phase vortex grating based on the optimal triplicator design», David presented the design and characterization of a liquid-crystal geometric phase diffraction grating that generates 3×3 diffraction orders with vortex beams of different topological charges, and showed the operation of this grating as a vortex detector. These results have recently been published in Optics Express: link to the paper.

Julio César presented a poster entitled “Hybrid vector beams generated by cascaded q-plates” where he demonstrated a q-plate-based optical system capable of generating a variety of hybrid vector beams, and showed the rotation of their polarization pattern when comparing the near field and the far field captures. This optical system is more compact than those based on SLMs whilst bearing a notable degree of versatility.

They have enjoyed the interesting conferences, scientific discussions and networking opportunities of this conference hosted by the OSA student chapter at ICFO and backed by the International OSA Network of Students. Link to the conference.

We published a new paper in Optics Letters entitled Encoding lenses with focal lengths lower than the Nyquist limit using high phase-modulation displays. In this work we show that focal lengths much lower than the classical Nyquist limit can be encoded onto spatial light modulators having a large phase-dynamic range.

Experimental results are included with a display showing 10π phase modulation reducing the Nyquist limit by a factor of about 1/10. We used a  Hamamatsu reflective LCoS device designed for use in the near infra-red (NIR) range, but operated with visible light in order to achieve such large modulation regimes.

The work has been done in collaboration with our friends at the Department of Physics of San Diego State University.