This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 9186 including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction, Tenure and Tenure-Track Faculty and Graduates, and the Conference Committee listing.

Aden B. Meinel established the University of Arizona Optical Sciences Center, now known as the College of Optical Sciences, in 1964 to fulfill a national need for more highly trained engineers and physicists in the optical sciences. Throughout its 50-year history, OSC has grown and evolved in response to industrial demand. It now includes a worldclass faculty and an international student body, and its academic programs offer more than 100 graduate and undergraduate courses, an ABET-accredited undergraduate optical sciences and engineering degree program, and outstanding M.S. and Ph.D. graduate programs with extensive distance learning options. Its graduates are in great demand and are employed by national and international governments, businesses and universities. This paper will describe the formation of OSC and its 50 years of excellence.

Upon its inception in 1964 as the Optical Sciences Center, only M.S. and Ph.D. degrees were offered, with a core curriculum consisting of five courses plus a few electives. Since then the Center has become a college within the University of Arizona, offering an ABET accredited BS degree in Optical Sciences and Engineering, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Optical Sciences, and a number of graduate certificates. The development of the curriculum for each of these degrees and certificates is discussed as well as how each curriculum attempts to meet the differing goals of the degrees offered.

The ‘60s were a tumultuous time. Just about every way of life changed: Human Rights, racial integration, personal relationships, business practices, church practices and then of course the Laser was created. The Cold War was at its peak and there was a lot of anxiety. “Change” created polarized (pun is intended) camps in almost every phase of life in every country of the world. It was in those times that the Optical Sciences Center came into existence.

Anecdotes and recollections from a graduate student at the Optical Sciences Center (OSC) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The early faculty of the OCS fostered an exciting environment where even graduate students served significant roles on major government research contracts. Teamwork and collaboration between research groups was often required to meet the contract goals. This unique learning experience at the OSC almost 50 years ago served as a springboard for a satisfying and rewarding career in Optical Engineering.

We present a review of the contributions by students, staff, faculty and alumni to the Nation’s space program over the past 50 years. The balloon polariscope led the way to future space optics missions. The missions Pioneer Venus (large probe solar flux radiometer), Pioneer 10/11 (imaging photopolarimeter) to Jupiter and Saturn, Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and next generation large aperture space telescopes are discussed.

Aden Meinel came from the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and the Department of Astronomy to found the Optical Sciences Center (OSC). Aden conceived and made at the Center of the optics for the revolutionary Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT), which greatly influenced the design of future large research telescopes and the technology needed to make them. The Steward Observatory Mirror Lab was built to make honeycomb mirrors up to 8.4 m diameter, and with much faster focal ratio. In use in the current Large Binocular Telescope and future Giant Magellan Telescope, these mirrors provide powerful astronomical research capabilities with unique sensitivity for exoplanet observations in the infrared. The solar energy field can also benefit from Aden’s legacy, by using multiple large solar mirrors configured like the MMT to power very high efficiency photovoltaic cells at each focus.

The origin of the Optical Sciences Center (OSC) at the University of Arizona was closely tied to the need to expand the national capability for manufacturing large optics. This connection allowed OSC to grow quickly to become a truly unique place where new technologies are born and applied and where students have opportunities to apply academic lessons to real-world projects. In the decades that follow, OSC has grown to become a leader in many other optical disciplines, including photonics, imaging, optical engineering, and optical physics. But the core capability of optical fabrication and testing has remained as a unique University of Arizona asset. The last decade has seen explosive growth in development and implementation of new technologies for manufacturing and measuring large optics at the College of Optical Sciences. The classic polishing techniques have given way to advanced computer controlled machines and highly engineered laps. New measuring methods have enabled accurate metrology of steeply aspheric surfaces, concave and convex, symmetric and freeform. This paper discusses the history of optical fabrication and testing at University of Arizona and reviews some recent major projects and the technical developments that have enabled their success.

The infrared program started in 1969 when I got there and became part of the overall program of the College, which was then a Center. In this discussion I would like to present the people – staff, students and associates – who made it all possible, the teaching program and some of the results of the research.

Roland Shack is credited with a number of what appear to be spontaneous inventions in the 1970s, including the Shack- Hartmann wavefront sensor, the Shack Cube interferometer, and the subject of this talk, an entirely new and revealing approach to the aberration fields of imaging optical systems that has come to be called Nodal Aberration Theory and recently emerged as the aberration of rotationally nonsymmetric imaging optical systems with freeform surfaces. Prof. Shack’s original impetus for considering a new approach to aberration theory was a puzzling through-focus star field photograph brought to him by astronomers in 1976 taken with the first large telescope made at the Optical Sciences Center, the 90” Bok Telescope. By 1977, he had developed the key mathematical moves needed to send aberration theory into an entirely new direction. He transferred this insight on one piece of engineering pad paper and moved on to other projects.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Optical Sciences Center, we recall the times when this event took place. We review historical conditions both in Arizona and in science evolution at the University of Arizona and in the USA. We concentrate on the period when Professor Franken was the director of the center. His objective was to consolidate the Center and align it closely with the University standards and procedures. The fact that within the past decade this entity has become a University of Arizona College bears witness to the fact that Dr. Franken succeeded in this task.

The College of Optical Sciences, OSC, has seen three periods of optical design teaching and development. The first years 1964-1969; the golden years 1970-1999; and the new millennia years. Today the college offers a comprehensive and professional curriculum in optical design learning, and enjoys a strong heritage in optical design. This paper provides a perspective into the history and future prospects in optical design at the OSC.

Quantum Optics at the Optical Sciences Center is traced from a gleam in Steve Jacobs’ eyes to a world class set of endeavors. The people involved include Jacobs, Scully, Sargent, Lamb, Hopf, Shoemaker, Meystre, Chow, Rogovin, Franken, Gibbs, Khitrova, Peyghambarian, Wright, Moloney, Lindberg, Koch and their students. The research areas include a wide variety of nonlinear interactions of electromagnetic radiation with atomic, molecular, and solid state matter. The theories in these investigations range from classical to semiclassical to fully quantal.

The emerging field of quantum engineering seeks to design and construct quantum devices for use in technological applications. To do so, one must learn to prepare a physical system in a well defined quantum state, drive it though a specified evolution, and access its final state through measurement. Historically, some of the most successful laboratory platforms with which to explore these challenges have originated in the field of quantum optics. This work reviews some of the recent advances in single- and many atom quantum control at the College of Optical Science, and their integration into a novel atom-light quantum interface.

The history of semiconductor quantum optics group in the College of Optical Sciences will be discussed. The work from planar microcavities including VCSELs, photonic crystal cavities leading to the observation of strong-coupling between an L3 cavity and a quantum dot, and now metallic cavities coupled to quantum wells and quantum dots will be described.

After a brief historical review, we describe recent research in the study of tera-Watt class femtosecond lasers propagating in air and condensed media. Here critical self-focusing of the light field reflects the presence of a famous singularity (blow-up in finite time) in the governing Nonlinear Schrö dinger equation (NLS) — this contribution deals with moving into a regime where NLSE fails and more exact optical carrier resolved pulse propagators need to be developed and secondly, addresses the failure of well-established phenomenological nonlinear optical susceptibilities and their replacement by more fundamental quantum models.

This paper reviews the history of research into imaging and image quality at the Optical Sciences Center (OSC), with emphasis on the period 1970-1990. The work of various students in the areas of psychophysical studies of human observers of images; mathematical model observers; image simulation and analysis, and the application of these methods to radiology and nuclear medicine is summarized. The rapid progress in computational power, at OSC and elsewhere, which enabled the steady advances in imaging and the emergence of a science of imaging, is also traced. The implications of these advances to ongoing research and the current Image Science curriculum at the College of Optical Sciences are discussed.

In the early 60s, the Arizona Board of Regents recruited a national committee, all outside the state of Arizona, and asked them two questions: 1. Is it time for the state of Arizona to begin its first medical school? 2. If affirmative, where should the medical school be located? The committee spent two years evaluating the question and returned the following answers: 1. Yes, the state has the population and resources to begin its first medical school. 2. It should be located at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The primary reason for recommending the U of A was its strong base and commitment to research. To avoid state politics the Arizona Board of Regents had previously decided to accept whatever recommendations came from the neutral national committee and these, word for word, would be sent to the state legislature. There was much political discussion. The legislature finally affirmed the recommendations of the board of regents and the medical school was then located at the U of A.

During the past two decades, researchers at the University of Arizona’s Center for Gamma-Ray Imaging (CGRI) have explored a variety of approaches to gamma-ray detection, including scintillation cameras, solid-state detectors, and hybrids such as the intensified Quantum Imaging Device (iQID) configuration where a scintillator is followed by optical gain and a fast CCD or CMOS camera. We have combined these detectors with a variety of collimation schemes, including single and multiple pinholes, parallel-hole collimators, synthetic apertures, and anamorphic crossed slits, to build a large number of preclinical molecular-imaging systems that perform Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), and X-Ray Computed Tomography (CT). In this paper, we discuss the themes and methods we have developed over the years to record and fully use the information content carried by every detected gamma-ray photon.

Compressive imaging exploits sparsity/compressibility of natural scenes to reduce the detector count/read-out bandwidth in a focal plane array by effectively implementing compression during the acquisition process. How-ever, realizing the full potential of compressive imaging entails several practical challenges, such as measurement design, measurement quantization, rate allocation, non-idealities inherent in hardware implementation, scalable imager architecture, system calibration and tractable image formation algorithms. We describe an information-theoretic approach for compressive measurement design that incorporates available prior knowledge about natural scenes for more efficient projection design relative to random projections. Compressive measurement quantization and rate-allocation problem are also considered and simulation studies demonstrate the performance of random and information-optimal projection designs for quantized compressive measurements. Finally we demonstrate the feasibility of optical compressive imaging with a scalable compressive imaging hardware implementation that addresses system calibration and real-time image formation challenges. The experimental results highlight the practical effectiveness of compressive imaging with system design constraints, non-ideal system components and realistic system calibration.

The information from a scene is critical in autonomous optical systems, and the variety of information that can be extracted is determined by the application. To characterize a target, the information of interest captured is spectral (λ), polarization (S) and distance (Z). There are many technologies that capture this information in different ways to identify the target. In many fields, such as mining and military reconnaissance, there is a need for rapid data acquisition and, for this reason, a relatively new method has been devised that can obtain all this information simultaneously. The need for snapshot acquisition of data without moving parts was the goal of the research. This paper reviews the chain of novel research instruments that were sequentially developed to capture spectral and polarization information of a scene in a snapshot or flash. The distance (Z) is yet to be integrated.

Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) is able to produce high purity, epitaxial multilayer films with well defined interfaces. This precise deposition control along with a number of in situ characterization instruments allows a high degree of control over the formation of multilayers. We have three MBE systems, each with characteristics suitable for a subset of possible materials, that we have used to produce a large variety of x-ray multilayers. Together these MBE systems contain Reflection High Energy Electron Diffraction (RHEED), Low Energy Electron Diffraction (LEED), Auger Electron Spectroscopy (AES), X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), Ion Scattering Spectroscopy (ISS), Secondary Ion Mass Spectroscopy (SIMS), and Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM). Here I provide an overview of the techniques the students, postdocs, visiting scientists, and collaborators have used to select the materials pairs we have grown and analyzed for our x-ray multilayers.

Polarization is often considered secondary aspect of the optical field, and in many instances is ignored, treating problems as scalar instead of vector. However, the polarized nature of the light carries information about the processes that the light has undergone, and can be a valuable tool in many aspects of remote sensing.? Polarization has been demonstrated to aid in target identification,?,? help image through turbid media,?,? and reduce clutter and increase contrast? in a variety of defense, surveillance, industrial, and medical applications.

A wearable augmented reality (AR) display enables the ability to overlay computer-generated imagery on a person’s real-world view and it has long been portrayed as a transformative technology to redefine the way we perceive and interact with digital information. In this paper, I will provide an overview on my research group’s past development efforts in augmented reality display technologies and applications and discuss key technical challenges and opportunities for future developments.

The photonics program at the College of Optical Sciences started nearly 30 years ago. In 1984, the program was focused on development of femtosecond laser sources and their use in investigating semiconductor carrier dynamics. The program grew into polymer and organic optics in late 1989 and was strengthened by the winning of the CAMP MURI from ONR in 1995 that was focused on multifunctional polymers including photorefractive polymers, organic light emitting diodes and 3D direct laser writing. Also in 1995, the areas of glass waveguide and fiber optic materials and devices were added to the program. In 2008, the optical communication and future internet research was started through winning the CIAN NSF ERC. Expertise in thin films, optical storage and the fundamental aspects of light are elements of the overall research program. Holographic 3D display, autofocus lenses, bio-medical imaging and devices for vision have also been ongoing research areas.

In 1980, Peter Franken, the second director of the Optical Sciences Center, recruited an international quartet of faculty members from the US, Canada, England and Israel (DS). Peter shaped the Center as a clockwork operation, nailing down every aspect of its administration, business model and academic vision. I found myself from day one in a highly competitive environment with extreme peer pressure to make good science and generate a lot of funds. This paper describes the academic journey through my three decades at the Optical Sciences Center that became the College of Optical Sciences (Optical Sciences, in short) until my retirement in 2010, by highlighting selected areas of my group’s research.

Photonics has been critical to the growth of the Internet that now carries a vast array of information over optical fiber. The future growth of information technology, including the transmission and processing of vast amounts of data, will require a new class of photonic devices that readily integrate directly with semiconductor circuits and processors. Nanophotonics will play a key role in this development, providing both designer optical materials and radically smaller and lower power consumption devices. We present our developments in engineered nanophotonic polymer materials and electro-optic polymer/silicon nanowire devices in the context of this burgeoning field.

Electromagnetic waves carry energy as well as linear and angular momenta. Interactions between light and material media typically involve the exchange of all three entities. In all such interactions energy and momentum (both linear and angular) are conserved. Johannes Kepler seems to have been the first person to notice that the pressure of sunlight is responsible for the tails of the comets pointing away from the Sun. Modern applications of radiation pressure and photon momentum include solar sails, optical tweezers for optical trapping and micro-manipulation, and optically-driven micro-motors and actuators. This paper briefly describes certain fundamental aspects underlying the mechanical properties of light, and examines several interesting phenomena involving the linear and angular momenta of photons.

The Optical Sciences Center (OSC) begun as a graduate-level applied optics teaching institution to support the US space effort. The making of optics representative of those used in other space programs was deemed essential. This led to the need for optical metrology: at first Hartmann tests, but almost immediately to interferometric tests using the newly invented HeNe laser. Not only were new types of interferometers needed, but the whole infrastructure that went with testing, fringe location methods, aberration removal software and contour map generation to aid the opticians during polishing needed to be developed. Over the last half century more rapid and precise methods of interferogram data reduction, surface roughness measurement, and methods of instrument calibration to separate errors from those in the optic have been pioneered at OSC. Other areas of research included null lens design and the writing of lens design software that led into the design of computer generated holograms for asphere testing. More recently work has been done on the reduction of speckle noise in interferograms, methods to test large convex aspheres, and a return to slope measuring tests to increase the dynamic range of the types of aspheric surfaces amenable to optical testing including free-form surfaces. This paper documents the history of the development of optical testing projects at OSC and highlights the contributions some of the individuals associated with new methods of testing and the infrastructure needed to support the testing. We conclude with comments about the future trends optical metrology.

The Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor is a technology that was developed at the Optical Sciences Center at the University of Arizona in the late 1960s. It is a robust technique for measuring wavefront error that was originally developed for large telescopes to measure errors induced by atmospheric turbulence. The Shack Hartmann sensor has evolved to become a relatively common non-interferometric metrology tool in a variety of fields. Its broadest impact has been in the area of ophthalmic optics where it is used to measure ocular aberrations. The data the Shack Hartmann sensor provides enables custom LASIK treatments, often enhancing visual acuity beyond normal levels. In addition, the Shack Hartmann data coupled with adaptive optics systems enables unprecedented views of the retina. This paper traces the evolution of the technology from the early use of screen-type tests, to the incorporation of lenslet arrays and finally to one of its modern applications, measuring the human eye.

Back in the early days Bill Wolf once said something like: “The guy with the lowest scatter measurement is closest to the right answer.” He was often right then – but not anymore. Everything has changed. Today measurements are limited by Rayleigh scatter from the air – not the instrument. We have both written and physical standards and everybody spells BRDF the same way. In the time it takes to give this talk, over 100,000 silicon wafers will be inspected around the world using a few thousand scatterometers – average price about one million dollars each. The way the world illuminates everything from homes to football fields is changing with the advent of high brightness LED’s and these lighting systems are designed using a combination of scatter metrology and analysis techniques – many of which were started at The Optical Sciences Center. This paper reviews two major highlights in half a century of scatter metrology progress.

A long-term research program has been in place at the College of Optical Sciences to apply interferometry to ophthalmic applications. These unique systems have been developed in response to industrial need. The first system is a transmission Mach-Zehnder interferometer used to measure the transmitted wavefront of a contact lens while it is submersed in saline. This interferometer allows the refractive power distribution of the lens to be measured. A second system makes use of a low-coherence interferometer to measure the index of refraction of contact lens materials. This task is complicated by the fact that the material is only available in very thin, flexible samples, and because the sample must remain hydrated in saline during the measurement. A third system also makes use of low-coherence interferometry to characterize the surface profile of both surfaces of a contact lens. Combined with index information, a complete model of the contact lens can be produced. Two additional interferometers examine the dynamics of fluid layers on the surface of a contact lens (in vitro) and of the tear film on the surface of the cornea (in vivo). Both systems are instantaneous phase shifting Twyman-Green interferometers. The evolution and changes to the fluid surface is measured at video rates with sub-wavelength precision. This paper tells the story of this research program.