Description

 2010/04/15, Dr. Steven Habraken (Leiden University, Netherlands)

Place:  Sala de Seminarios del Departamento de Física Teórica e Historia de la Ciencia
Time: 10:30
Title: Rays and Waves in Singular Optics

Abstract
We study the spatial structure, physical properties and quantum dynamics of coherent optical modes with twisted and rotating boundary conditions. Our characterization of such modes is exact up to leading order of the paraxial approximation and involves two pairs of bosonic ladder operators in the spirit of the quantum-mechanical harmonic oscillator, which connect modes of different order. Although the ladder operators act in the  wave-optical domain, their transformation through an optical set-up can be expressed in terms of a ray matrix, which describes the transformation of a ray through the same set-up and has a purely geometric-optics significance. We discuss various geometric aspects such as the rotational stabilization and destabilization of an optical cavity and the geometric origin of generalized Gouy phase shifts.