Speaker
Description
Passing a beam through an aberrated optical system can result in unwanted changes to both the
phase and amplitude of the beam. These changes can greatly degrade many important properties
of the beam such as the resolution, spot size in focusing and the beam quality factor. These
aberrations are generally corrected for using pre- or post-corrective optics or other methods. The
ideal solution for overcoming these issues would be to find the structures of light that remain
unchanged when passing through these aberrated systems, also called the eigenmodes of the
system. In this work we show that these modes can be calculated by treating the optical system
as an operator and then finding the eigenstates of the operator. We experimentally confirm the
effectiveness of the method by making use of the topical example of the tilted lens, which is a
highly astigmatic system that has been used to measure the topological charge of OAM modes.
We find the eigenmodes of the tilted lens analytically and demonstrate their practical robustness
using an experimental setup. This work has many applications in the fields of optics, imaging
and optical communications.
Level for award;(Hons, MSc, PhD, N/A)?
MSc
| Apply to be considered for a student ; award (Yes / No)? | Yes |
|---|
