Structured Light: Tallored for purpose. Prof. Andrew Forbes

In this colloquium, we will explore how to create and manipulate exotically structured light fields with a modern optics toolkit, and cover some example applications in classical, laser and quantum optics. It will be a tutorial style talk that covers the basics of the field while highlighting the benefits that such control could bring to the user. Structured light is a term used to describe optical fields that have been tailored in their spatial intensity, phase and polarization distributions, and may even be extended to include tailored light in the time and frequency domain too. Structured light has found many applications, including optical manipulation in biological systems, laser materials processing for better resolution, quality and efficacy, seeing smaller objects in microscopy, and new approaches to designing lasers, to name a few, spanning both fundamental science and applications alike. Andrew has at various times in his career found himself as teacher, janitor, secretary, receptionist, web-master, systems engineer, sales rep, manager, director, and sometimes a scientist. Andrew is presently a Distinguished Professor within the School of Physics at the U. Witwatersrand (South Africa) where in 2015 he established a new laboratory for Structured Light. Andrew is active in promoting photonics in Africa, a founding member of the Photonics Initiative of South Africa and initiator of South Africa’s Quantum Roadmap. He is a Fellow of SPIE, the OSA, the SAIP, and an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.