Related papers: Stress mirror polishing for future large lightweig…
Instrumented spherical nanoindentation with a continuous stiffness measurement has gained increased popularity in material science studies in brittle and ductile materials alike. These investigations span hypotheses related to a wide range…
The advent of extremely large telescopes will bring unprecedented light-collecting power and spatial resolution, but it will also lead to a significant increase in the size and complexity of focal-plane instruments. The use of freeform…
This paper develops approximate message passing algorithms to optimize multi-species spherical spin glasses. We first show how to efficiently achieve the algorithmic threshold energy identified in our companion work, thus confirming that…
Star test polarimetry is an imaging polarimetry technique in which an element with spatially-varying birefringence is placed in the pupil plane to encode polarization information into the point-spread function (PSF) of an imaging system. In…
We developed a scan mirror mechanism (SMM) that enable a slit-based spectrometer or spectropolarimeter to precisely and quickly map an astronomical object. The SMM, designed to be installed in the optical path preceding the entrance slit,…
We investigate the convergence of stochastic mirror descent (SMD) under interpolation in relatively smooth and smooth convex optimization. In relatively smooth convex optimization we provide new convergence guarantees for SMD with a…
Micro scanning mirrors (MSM) extend the range and field of view of LiDARs, medical imaging devices, and laser projectors. However, a new class of soft-hinged MSMs contains out-of-plane translation in addition to the 2 degree-of-freedom…
The 3D printing technology based on digital light processing (DLP) has highlighted its powerful manufacturing capabilities for optical components. However, the printing structure obtained by DLP based down projection printing is easily…
The imaging sharpness of an X-ray telescope is chiefly determined by the optical quality of its focusing optics, which in turn mostly depends on the shape accuracy and the surface finishing of the grazing-incidence X-ray mirrors that…
Shape from Polarization (SfP) estimates surface normals using photos captured at different polarizer rotations. Fundamentally, the SfP model assumes that light is reflected either diffusely or specularly. However, this model is not valid…
The realization of X-ray telescopes with imaging capabilities in the hard (> 10 keV) X-ray band requires the adoption of optics with shallow (< 0.25 deg) grazing angles to enhance the reflectivity of reflective coatings. On the other hand,…
The Point Spread Function (PSF) is a key figure of merit for specifying the angular resolution of optical systems and, as the demand for higher and higher angular resolution increases, the problem of surface finishing must be taken…
The most pressing problems in modern astrophysics have often required the largest telescopes. With the cost scaling of mirror diameters, the field as a whole is faced with a challenge -- how to replicate or improve on the collecting area…
Simulated images are essential in algorithm development and instrument testing for optical telescopes. During real observations, images obtained by optical telescopes are affected by spatially variable point spread functions (PSFs), a…
Sensitivity and resolution of space telescopes are directly related to the size of the primary mirror. Enabling such future extremely large space telescopes or even arrays of those will require to drastically reduce the areal weight of the…
Stokes polarimetry (SP) is a powerful technique that enables spatial reconstruction of the state of polarization (SoP) of a light beam using only intensity measurements. A given SoP is reconstructed from a set of four Stokes parameters,…
We develop a comprehensive approach to simulate the deformation of mirrors and lenses due to thermal and mechanical stresses that couples efficiently to photon-based optics simulations. This expands upon previous work where we demonstrated…
Plasmon hybridization between closely spaced nanoparticles yields new hybrid modes not found in individual constituents, allowing for the engineering of resonance properties and field enhancement capabilities of metallic nanostructure.…
Optical approaches for wavefront shaping traditionally rely on phase modulation through holographic techniques. Shaping the phase determines a wave's diffraction and hence its intensity distribution in space. We instead show that shaping…
A main science goal for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is to measure the cosmic shear signal from weak lensing to extreme accuracy. One difficulty, however, is that with the short exposure time ($\simeq$15 seconds) proposed, the…