CAREER:Optical Coherence Engineering

人们观察到的大多数光（例如灯泡，太阳光）只是部分相干的，而激光的光是相干的。本计画旨在设计并建立部分相干光成像光学系统。如果成功，这项研究将导致新的相机的能力，数字重新聚焦和消除像差的图像。它还可以通过任何光学系统（例如显微镜或相机）合成传播光，并通过计算取代许多光学元件。通过这项工作开发的知识将导致新的成像技术的商业产品和研究仪器工具。该项目的研究成果将用于通过一系列演示向广大受众教授光学和相干理论，这些演示将在外联活动和热门网站上传播。PI的长期教育目标包括向下一代科学家和工程师推广实践科学经验。本研究的目标是建立四维（4D）部分空间相干光成像的实验和计算方案。该方法是使用计算成像，从而硬件和后处理算法的设计同时在相空间光学的框架内。将为基于空间光调制器的成像系统开发智能编码策略，以便能够快速捕获4D中的高分辨率相干信息。由于部分相干光束具有更多的自由度，因此有机会对更大量的信息进行编码和解码。这将导致能够对无镜头相机拍摄的图像进行数字聚焦，数字消除像差，并对图像进行数字滤波以在后处理中提取新信息。该项目将通过提供用于可视化相干性的简单成像系统来促进科学发现，相干性是光学科学中具有根本重要性的不可见量。

Most light that people observe (e.g. light bulbs, sun light) is only partially coherent, whereas light from a laser is coherent. This project aims to design and build optical systems for imaging partially coherent light. If successful, this research will lead to novel cameras with the ability to digitally refocus and remove aberrations in images. It would also make possible to synthetically propagate light through any optical system (e.g. a microscope or camera) and replace many optical elements via computation. The knowledge developed by this work will lead to new imaging techniques for commercial products and research instrumentation tools. Research results from this project will be used to teach optics and coherence theory to a broad audience through a collection of demos that will be disseminated at outreach events and on popular websites. The long-term educational goals of the PI include promoting hands-on science experience to the next generation of scientists and engineers.The objective of this research is to build experimental and computational schemes for imaging four-dimensional (4D) partially spatially coherent light. The approach is to use computational imaging, whereby hardware and post-processing algorithms are designed simultaneously within the framework of phase space optics. Smart coding strategies will be developed for imaging systems based on spatial light modulators, in order to enable fast capture of high-resolution coherence information in 4D. Since partially coherent light beams have many more degrees-of-freedom, there is an opportunity for encoding and decoding greater amounts of information. This will lead to the ability to digitally focus images taken with lens-less cameras, digitally remove aberrations, and digitally filter images to extract new information in post-processing. This project will benefit scientific discovery by providing simple imaging systems for visualizing coherence, an invisible quantity of fundamental importance in optical sciences.