STRUCTURED LIGHT

We are a small, diverse and dynamic group in the School of Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa... Our history traces back to traditional laser beam shaping for commercial applications, then mathematical optics and its applications at the CSIR National Laser Centre, to the new laboratory at Wits, started in 2015. Here we look at Structured Light and its applications. The ability to tailor optical fields is an essential tool in a modern optics laboratory and has come of age with liquid crystal technology, allowing for the digital control of light. By Structured Light we mean the creation of arbitrarily complex light patterns through the control of light's polarisation, amplitude and phase. We used these tools to create accelerating light, non-diffracting light, vector light fields and light carrying optical vortices and orbital angular momentum. We also use these tools to unravel light, what we call modal decomposition, or a "pattern sensitive detector". We..

Also known as: Structured Light Laboratory