Tea and coffee will be served from 16.45 in the Physics Common Room, Level 8, Blackett Laboratory.
For many centuries we have been using mirrors, lenses and other optical elements to produce scientific instruments that have underpinned a large part of our understanding and discovery in many scientific fields. Most recently though we have developed the devices and techniques to control light dynamically by computer, often in ways that would be unimaginable with the fixed glass optics of the past.
This talk will focus on two key technologies and their applications. First, spatial light modulators allow us to manipulate light using computer generated holograms to shape wavefronts, for applications including super-resolution imaging, optical trapping and metrology of complex surface shapes by interferometry. Second, structured illumination techniques, where patterns of light from emissive displays or even moving masks are projected into imaging systems, enable us to provide stimuli to or extract useful imagery from three-dimensional objects.
Biography
Mark Neil studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge before pursuing his PhD in Optical Information Processing at the Engineering Department there. Moving then to the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford University, he continued his work in optics as a postdoctoral researcher and college lecturer until joining the Photonics Group in the Physics Department at Imperial in 2002.
With such a broad academic background it is hardly surprising that he often finds himself working in multidisciplinary projects alongside engineers, medics, chemists and biologists and on problems as diverse as studying the inner workings of cancer cells to manufacturing mirrors for forthcoming generations of extremely large astronomical telescopes. While imaging, microscopy and metrology are the mainstays of his work, underpinning this are technologies that enable the control of light by computer that is now changing how we view the potential applications of optical systems.