Dr Carl Paterson

Royal Society University Research Fellow

Dr Paterson has made contributions to a number of areas during his research career including diffractive optics, optical dislocations, excimer laser ablation for micromachining, and most recently adaptive optics. He started his research career at Imperial College in 1990, as a graduate student, working on diffractive optics. He introduced new generalized techniques for producing waves containing phase dislocations or optical vortices and used these to study the propagation of wavefront dislocations and propagation invariant beams, some of which have found applications in optical tweezer and particle trapping work.

As a post-doctoral researcher, he studied excimer laser ablation applied to MEMS micro-machining, developing models for the removal of material from a substrate by ablation.

His current research interests are in adaptive optics and imaging. The main emphasis of his research to date has been towards the industrial and medical application of adaptive optics, but also includes astronomy. Dr Paterson holds a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

Current research topics include:

Optical propagation over long paths through strong turbulence, and associated phenomena of scintillation and wavefront dislocations
Multi-conjugate adaptive optics for both astronomy and non-astronomical applications
Adaptive optics for line-of-sight optical communications
An adaptive optics toolkit for industry
Adaptive optics in the eye for retinal imaging and vision
New wavefront sensing techniques.

Adaptive Optics

Research Associate:

Alfredo Dubra

Research Students:

Jonathan Brooks

Allison Craig

Simon Clay

Stephen Gruppetta

Yuet Kwok

James Notaras

 

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Carl Paterson
The Blackett Laboratory
Prince Consort Road
London SW7 2BW
Tel : +44-(0)20-7594 7737
Fax : +44-(0)20-7594 7714
Email: carl.paterson@imperial.ac.uk
Web: www.photonics.imperial.ac.uk