CAREER:Optical Coherence Engineering

人们观察到的大多数光（如灯泡、太阳光）只有部分相干，而激光发出的光是相干的。本项目旨在设计和构建部分相干光成像光学系统。如果成功的话，这项研究将导致新型相机的出现，这种相机具有数字重调焦和消除图像像差的能力。它还可以通过任何光学系统（如显微镜或照相机）合成传播光，并通过计算取代许多光学元件。这项工作所开发的知识将为商业产品和研究仪器工具带来新的成像技术。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，这些演示将在推广活动和流行网站上传播。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。本研究的目的是建立四维（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，在相空间光学的框架内同时设计硬件和后处理算法。将为基于空间光调制器的成像系统开发智能编码策略，以便能够在4D中快速捕获高分辨率相干信息。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。这将导致用无镜头相机拍摄的图像进行数字对焦，数字消除像差，并在后期处理中对图像进行数字滤波以提取新信息的能力。该项目将通过提供简单的成像系统来可视化相干性，从而有利于科学发现，相干性是光学科学中一个不可见的重要基础量。

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.