Lecture Starts at 11:30
PSW #2424
www.pswscience.org
September 11, 2020
Vortices of Light and Matter Waves: A New Twist on Light and Particles
Charles W. Clark
NIST & University of Maryland
Everyone who can see has an intuitive experience of light. It seems to arrive in straight rays right into our eyes!
Of course, we have known for some time that light is a type of wave or quantum particle motion, with a polarization perpendicular to its direction of propagation. Only since the early 1990s, however, has it been fully appreciated we can exploit another intrinsic property of light: its ability to wrap around itself in quantized motion as it travels (optical “orbital angular momentum” or OAM). This also occurs in other wave phenomena, including the wave mechanics of quantum particles.
This lecture will describe the basic elements of twisted light and matter, and it will describe their recent applications in areas such as communication, encryption, microscopy, measurement and vision.
Charles Clark is a NIST Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He is also a JQI Fellow and past Co-Director of the Joint Quantum Institute of NIST and the University of Maryland. Following postdoctoral work in England, he joined NIST (then called the National Bureau of Standards), and he has stayed there ever since. For a decade during his tenure at NIST Charles served as a program manager in the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research.
Charles works on basic and applied problems of atomic, molecular, optical and neutron physics and has a keen interest in vision systems in biology.
He has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, National University of Singapore, Australian National University and University of Malaya.
Charles earned his BA in Mathematics and Physics at Western Washington State, his SM at the University of Chicago, and his PhD at the University of Chicago.
More information is available at jqi.umd.edu/people/charles-clark.
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