Enabling Smart Vision Through Meta-Optics

Light carries a vast amount of information about the world around us, but most of it remains invisible to our eyes. This information is contained in the light's polarization, phase, momentum, and frequency range beyond the visible spectrum. Metasurfaces, arrays of subwavelength resonant nanostructures, offer unique opportunities to visualize this hidden information by enabling smart and precise measurements of these properties. Prominent examples include polarization imaging, which can remove specular reflections, or edge-detection, which can improve object recognition for autonomous vehicles.

In this webinar, Dragomir Neshev will explain the underlying principles for the detection of such hidden properties of light and demonstrate new applications in satellite hyperspectral and polarization imaging, as well as in aberration correction for large telescope adaptive optics. Dr. Neshev will further show how metasurfaces can enhance the conversion of infrared light to visible, enabling compact and low-noise infrared imaging. Finally, he'll demonstrate how such nonlinear up-conversion can offer unique opportunities for all-optical convolution operations and advanced image processing for object recognition applications.

Subject Matter Level: Intermediate - Assumes basic knowledge of the topic

What You Will Learn:
• Principles of polarisation and phase detection through metasurfaces.
• Infrared to visible up-conversion in metasurfaces
• All-optical image processing and computing

Who Should Attend:
• Students and academics researching in the field of meta-optics.
• Optical designers for space and telescopic systems

About the Presenter:  Dragomir Neshev from Australian National University

Dragomir Neshev is the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) and a Professor of Physics at the Australian National University (ANU). He received a PhD from Sofia University, Bulgaria, in 1999. Since then, he has worked at several research centres worldwide before joining the ANU in 2002. His activities span several branches of optics, including meta-optics, metasurfaces, periodic photonic structures, and singular optics. He has been recognised for his outstanding work in photonics by several honours, including being named a Highly Cited Researcher (Web of Science, 2023, 2022 & 2021), receiving a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship (ARC, 2010), and being awarded a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship (European Commission, 2001). He is an Associate Editor for Optica, and his publications include over 290 journal articles.