Modern polarization optics

Modern Optics and Spectroscopy

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer accounting for one in every three cancers diagnosed in American women. Currently breast cancer screening is performed by a combination of annual clinical breast examinations and x-ray mammography. However, only 1025% of the suspicious lesions detected during mammography are in fact malignant. This high rate of false positive mammographic screening ...

Modern Optics and Spectroscopy

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a novel biomedical imaging technique which uses lowcoherence optical interferometry to obtain micron-scale resolution tomographic images of subsurface tissue structure noninvasively. We have developed OCT scanners compatible with minimally invasive delivery technologies (i.e., biomicroscopy, endoscopy) capable of imaging up to video rate. Clinical studies o...

Modern Optics and Spectroscopy

The research group at Columbia University investigated carrier dynamics in SWNTs in micellar solution. They found that nonradiative Auger recombination is an important mechanism of fluorescence quenching in SWNTs. At low pH, nanotube surface endoperoxides protonate and introduce holes that quench the luminescence. In order to characterize electronic structure of SWNTs at the single-tube level, ...

Polarization Optics of Periodic Media

Polarization splitter and polarization rotator designs based on transformation optics.

The transformation optics technique is employed in this paper to design two optical devices - a two-dimensional polarization splitter and a three-dimensional polarization rotator for propagating beams. The polarization splitter translates the TM- and the TE-polarized components of an incident beam in opposite directions (i.e., shifted up or shifted down). The polarization rotator rotates the po...