Intro Sentence: UCLA researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed a novel method for all-optical phase conjugation to correct phase aberrations for various applications, including laser beam focusing and optical communications.
Background: Distortion of wavefronts causes deviation from its ideal shape through propagation, often causing blurring, reduced image quality, aberrations, and reduced signal intensity. Optical phase conjugation is a method that can reverse these distortions, restoring the initial quality and information of the wavefront. There are two main methods of phase conjugation: analog and digital. Analog methods allow for rapid and continuous phase modulation, but suffer from low conjugation reflectivity, meaning lower efficiency and loss of signal strength. Digital methods have higher conjugation reflectivity, but they have much slower response time and higher cost due to complex technological requirements. There is a clear market need for fast, simple, and accurate ways of performing phase conjugation without expensive components.
Innovation: Researchers led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan have developed an all-optical phase conjugation system able to correct phase aberrations across different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. There is no need for lenses, mirrors, digital processing, or external power sources. The conjugation is achieved at the speed of light propagation due to the elimination of the need for digital computation and light field modulation known to slow down other digital processing methods. The system consists of a set of passive diffractive layers that were optimized using deep learning algorithms, and the effectiveness of this approach was validated using terahertz radiation on phase distortions that the model was not trained on. Applying this new all-optical phase conjugation method can improve complex imaging systems by reducing distortions and errors.
Potential Applications: • Computer vision • Optical communications • Adaptive optics • Turbidity suppression • Multispectral imaging • Pulse shaping • Spectral filtering
Advantages: • Compact and scalable • Adaptable to different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum • No processing delay • All-optical processing • Low power consumption
Development-To-Date: Method has been described and validated in a preprint publication
Related Papers:
Shen, CY., Li, J., Gan, T. et al. All-optical phase conjugation using diffractive wavefront processing. Nat Commun 15, 4989 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49304-y
Reference: UCLA Case No. 2024-104
Lead Inventor: Aydogan Ozcan