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.
