Swings and roundabouts: operators and rays for structured light beams

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• Mark Dennis (Birmingham)
• Wednesday 16 October 2019, 13:00-14:00
• Physics East 217.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Giovanni Barontini.

A major theme of modern free-space optics involves structured light beams, such as Hermite-Gaussian beams from a laser cavity, Laguerre-Gaussian and Bessel beams carrying orbital angular momentum, Airy beams which appear to accelerate… These can be described as evolving quantum wavepackets via the analogy between the Schrodinger and the paraxial wave equation. I will describe a geometric optics construction which determines each family of beams in terms of families of light rays, weighted appropriately by amplitudes and phases which emerge from a Hamiltonian analysis. Not only does this give new ingight into the standard beam families, it provides a significant generalization to all of them, allowing for continuous freedom in the design of new Gaussian, accelerating or propagation-invariant families of structured light beams.

This talk is part of the Cold atoms series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Bham Talks
• Cold Atoms
• Cold atoms
• Physics East 217
• What's on in Physics?

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