Lucero will compete, among other 41 semifinalists, for cash prizes and business support.
In addition, Lucero was awarded one of the three Early Stage Entrepreneurship Travel Grants to attend the semi-final.
The start-up is aiming to make cutting-edge laser technology easy to use and available to anyone by combining it with commercial microscope. The product and software combo utilizes optical tweezers in a brand-new way – and bridges the gap between physics and other scientific fields that would greatly benefit from easier access to this tool.
Optics & Photonics News has picked Saga Helgadóttir and Aykut Argun’s work on deep learning for particle tracking (DeepTrack) as a top break-through of the year.
“This has been a really good year for me, research-wise. My publication, presenting a new AI method, garnered a lot of attention,” says Saga Helgadóttir, PhD at the Department of Physics.
The research article in question, which is now included in Optics & Photonics News’ best-of-2019 list, identifies a new way of implementing neural networks and machine learning in order to track particle motion and study surrounding microenvironments.
Currently, Saga Helgadottir is collaborating with a group of scientists at Sahlgrenska’s Wallenberg Laboratory. They are working on new ways of using deep learning in the medical field.
“I started my PhD research studying bio-hybrid microswimmers, but ended up more within the area of artificial intelligence and optics. I like this work a lot, and the positive response to my publication earlier this year has allowed me to establish myself in the AI-field.”
Harshith Bachimanchi. (Photo by A. Argun)Controlled generation of high power optical vortex arrays, and their frequency-doubling characteristics
Seminar by Harshith Bachimanchi from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune (IISER Pune).
Optical vortices, beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) per photon are of supreme interest in recent times for their wide variety of applications in quantum information, micro-manipulation, and material lithography [1, 2, 3]. Due to a helical phase variation in propagation, and an undefined phase at the centre, these beams have a phase singularity in their wavefront, resulting in the doughnut-shaped intensity distribution. Though the vortex beams have been widely explored in the past, the recent advancements on multiple particle trapping, single-shot material lithography, and multiplexing in quantum information [4] demand an array of optical vortices in a simple experimental scheme.
While the majority of the existing mode converters transform the Gaussian beam into a single vortex beam, the intrinsic advantage of the dynamic phase modulation through holographic technique allow the spatial light modulators (SLMs) to generate vortex arrays directly from a Gaussian beam. However, the low damage threshold of SLMs restricts their usage for high power vortex array applications.
Here, we elaborate a simple experimental scheme to generate high power, ultrafast, higher order optical vortex arrays. Simply by using a dielectric Microlens array (MLA) and a plano-convex lens we generate an array of beams carrying the spatial property of the input beam. Though we’ve verified the technique for the case of optical vortices, it holds true for a useful subset of structured optical beams. Considering the MLA as a 2D sinusoidal phase grating, we have numerically calculated the intensity pattern of the array beams in close agreement with the experimental results. We have also theoretically derived the parameters controlling the intensity pattern, size and the pitch of array and verified experimentally. The single-pass frequency doubling of the vortex array at 1064 nm in a 1.2 mm BiBO crystal produced green vortex arrays of orders as high as lsh = 12, twice the order of the pump array beam, with a conversion efficiency as high as ∼3.65% [5].
References:
Grier, D. G. A revolution in optical manipulation. Nature424, 810 (2003)
Mair, A., Vaziri, A., Weihs, G. & Zeilinger, A. Entanglement of the orbital angular momentum states of photons. Nature412, 313 (2001).
Scott, T. F., Kowalski, B. A., Sullivan, A. C., Bowman, C. N. & McLeod, R. R. Two-color single-photon photoinitiation and photoinhibition for subdiffraction photo-lithography. Science324, 913–917 (2009).
Omatsu, T. et al. Metal microneedle fabrication using twisted light with spin. Opt. Express18, 17967–17973 (2010).
Harshith, B.S., Samanta, G.K. Controlled generation of array beams of higher order orbital angular momentum and study of their frequency-doubling characteristics. Sci Rep9, 10916 (2019).
Citation
Philip H. Jones, Onofrio M. Maragò & Giovanni Volpe. Optical Tweezers: Principles and Applications. Cambridge University Press, 2015. ISBN:9781107051164
