Environmental and Fiber Sensing with Structured Light
Abstract
Structured light is being widely used to revolutionize the technologies used in optical trapping, microscopy, astronomical metrology, optical communication, quantum information systems, and many others. One defines an optical wavefront that has been spatially shaped in its phase, polarisation or intensity as structured light. Prof. Lavery will present an introduction to the research field and an overview of their work in the Structured Photonics Research Group, at the University of Glasgow, in the creation, detection, and application of shaped optical beams for a range of sensing applications. He will discuss the development of technologies to generate and measure structured light, including reconfigurable platforms based on silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs).
Further, he will present their recent advances in utilising structured light for sensing in complex optical environments such as underwater scattering, atmospheric turbulence, and multimode optical fibers. They have developed approaches that use spatial mode sensitive receivers to extract features buried in aberrated optical fields that can increase the accuracy of the measurement of particulates in submersed channels, measure wind speed and temperature from the air, and sense changes in the shape of optical fibers. These sensors could be used for environmental pollution sensing in water, failure monitoring in mechanical systems, and sub-km weather monitoring critical for developing accurate climate models.
Biography
Professor Martin Lavery is a Full Professor in Optics and is the leader of the Structured Photonics Research Group at the James Watt School of Engineering at the University of Glasgow (UofG). Prof. Lavery has a portfolio
of over $6 million in independent research funding as Principal Investigator (PI) and is leading the H2020 Future and Emerging Technologies (FET-Open) consortium project named SuperPixels, each of which have an array of international partners from both industry and academia. He has held the prestigious Royal Academy of
Engineering (RAEng) Research Fellowship from 2014-2019. Prof. Lavery’s H-index is 41 with over 60 publications in peer-reviewed journals and over 80 conference
manuscripts that have collectively attracted over 11,000 citations (Google Scholar, Dec 2022). He has been awarded the 2013 Scopus Young Scientist of the Year for Physical Sciences, the 2018 Mobile World Scholar Gold Medal, and the 2019 Royal Society of Edinburgh Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane Medal for accomplishments in
optical communication and sensing.
