Project description
Optical technology that eliminates scattering effects
Turbulent atmospheres, flexible optical fibres, and living tissue are dynamic, opaque materials that distort light through intricate scattering, impacting imaging technologies and obstructing data transmission in free-space and fibre-optic systems. The ERC-funded ModeMixer project will develop optical technology to eliminate scattering effects, enabling clearer imaging and more efficient data transfer. By leveraging advanced adaptive optics and prototype inverters, the project will unscramble light in multimode optical fibres. Key objectives include real-time scattering monitoring, creating digital twins for light unscrambling, and developing optical circuits to cloak scattering effects. Applications range from reversing light distortions and improving quantum-entangled photon transmission to advancing hybrid optoelectronic neural networks.
Objective
The turbulent atmosphere, flexible optical fibres, and living tissue, are all examples of opaque materials that change in time. Light propagating through these moving complex media is subject to intricate dynamic scattering effects: transmitted optical fields are unrecognisably distorted in space and time. Such phenomena permeate real-world imaging and communications technologies. They prevent microscopy deep into living tissue and hinder both free-space and fibre-optic data transmission.
My vision is the realisation of optical technology that automatically configures itself to dynamically cloak unwanted scattering effects of any opaque medium it is coupled to making it possible to look through to an unobstructed view of scenes on the other side. The multimodal nature of this challenge calls for a raft of new sensing and light control techniques. The aim of this proposal is to develop these technologies.
I have begun to take some of the first experimental steps to achieve these goals: I have developed a new form of adaptive optics that suppresses temporal rather than spatial light distortion. I have also implemented prototype adaptive optical inverters, capable of all-optically unscrambling light propagation through multimode optical fibres (MMFs) supporting ~30 modes. My project builds on these concepts, and is delivered through 3 overarching objectives:
1. Real-time monitoring of spatio-temporal scattering in dynamic complex media: Creating dynamic digital twins of complex media that evolve in real-time.
2. All-optically unscrambling dynamically scattered light: Building new types of programmable optical circuit driven by our digital twins to cloak spatio-temporal scattering effects.
3. Applications: reversing the scattering effects of MMFs and atmospheric turbulence; enabling transmission of quantum entangled photons through noisy channels; and finally, investigating the broader implications of our technology to hybrid opto-electronic neural networks.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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EX4 4QJ Exeter
United Kingdom
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