Analytical approach to hollow core Photonic Crystal Fiber for gas sensing

Interference of light can be used to determine the concentration of a gas, called gas sensing. The absorption of the light by the gas molecules is measured based on the phase change of the light. In this report, a hollow core photonic crystal fiber is treated. The gas sample is inserted into the hollow core. Photonic crystal fibers possess the...

Topology Optimization and Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Metamaterial Optics Design

The development of optical metamaterials in recent years has enabled the design of novel optical devices with exciting properties and applications ranging across many fields, including in scientific instrumentation for space missions. This in<br/>turn has led to demand for computational methods which can produce efficient device designs....

Designing free-form optics for multiple-source illumination using differentiable ray-tracing and neural networks

Differentiable ray-tracing is an exciting new development in computer graphics to approach all sorts of 3D scene design problems by obtaining gradients of renders produced by ray-tracing with respect to parameters that define the scene. These gradients can then be incorporated in a gradient-descent type optimization pipeline.<br/><br/>One such...

Exoplanet surface mapping for Fresnel light curves

This thesis develops a method to map the surface of an exoplanet. The problem of exoplanet mapping sounds easy to solve. Take a few photographs of an exoplanet and sew them together to create a map of the surface. The telescope required to do this is far beyond our technological capabilities. However, our current telescopes could allow us to...

Exoplanet surface mapping with composite light reflection models

In the near future, next-generation telescopes will be able to observe Earth-like exoplanets illuminated by their parent stars for long periods of time. As the distance between exoplanet and observer is enormous, exoplanets will only make up a pixel on our image. However, the observed intensity of this pixel will fluctuate over time as the...

Orientation of Spherical Janus Nanoparticles: Force and Torque Calculations due to an External Electric Field

Janus particles are colloidal particles for which one half of the surface has different attributes than the other half. One property of a spherical dielectric particle with half of its surface covered by a layer of another dielectric or metal is that it has a non-uniform scattering pattern when exposed to light. However, the angle with which the...

Diffractive optical elements are all you need: Designing an optical system using physics-informed and data-driven methods

In this work, we consider how to optimize an optical system, specifically one with diffractive optical elements (DOE). We start by describing optical theory called Fourier optics also known as wave optics. This type of optics is found by making assumptions from the Maxwell equations for magnetic and electrical fields. This leads us to the...

The Atmoscope: Using a Planet's Atmosphere as a Telescope

The Atmoscope is the idea to use the atmosphere of a planet as a telescopic lens. It uses the refractive properties of an atmosphere to converge light rays to a focal line. It has been hypothesized that using Earth’s atmosphere could, under favorable circumstances, yield an amplification of 55; 000 for a detector that has a surface area of 1m2....

Exoplanet surface mapping using scattered light curves

In this thesis, we provide a method for reconstructing a planet's surface map from its reflected light curve. We are going to derive an equation for the reflective light-curve under the assumption that the surface map is characterized by four different surface types (ocean, vegetation, sand and snow), is stationary (no clouds), and that all...

PINN inspired Freeform Design: Using Fraunhofer Diffraction to find Freeforms described by B-spline Surfaces

This project aims to recreate intensity patterns using Fraunhofer diffraction as a means of simulation. These intensity patterns are created by phase shifting specific parts of an incoming field of light. These phase shifts are determined by a B-spline surface, which is in turn controlled by so-called control points. Only a handful of control...

Freeform lens predictions by a Neural Network and B-splines: Utilizing the Fraunhofer approximation to train a Neural Network unsupervised

There exist a lot of methods to find the electromagnetic field behind a lens, so called the forward lens problem. In contrast very few methods can do the inverse, namely finding a lens that would produce a given image or light distribution for a known source. Here a solution to the forward problem, the Fraunhofer approximation, is used to find...

Design and simulation of an invisibility cloak device in Julia

Mankind has always adapted materials to fullfil a need. Recent developments in nano-science allows us to construct objects with varying permittivity and permeability. One possible structure is an invisibility cloak device. This device is put around an object. Any plane wave that enters the cloak should go around this object. The wave exits the...

TiEMPO:Time-Dependent End-to-End Model for Post-process Optimization of the DESHIMA Spectrometer

Ultra-wideband submillimeter observations are crucial to study the process of star and galaxy formation and for characterizing cosmic dust in the interstellar medium. The Deep Spectroscopic High-redshift Mapper 2.0 (DESHIMA 2.0) will use an integrated superconducting spectrometer chip with a 220-440 GHz band coverage and a spectral resolution of...

Eclipses by exomoons

The aim of this research is to study a method to find exomoons and to find specific characteristics that point to the existence of exomoons. Exomoons are natural satellites orbiting an extrasolar (exo)planet in an extrasolar system. By looking at eclipses on exoplanets, we can find these characteristics.<br/>We consider the reflected light...

An exact solution for dipole fields inside optical multilayer structures

In this report, we derive some tools that can be used to construct semi-analytical solution for the electromagnetic field of a dipole in an arbitrary multilayer system. The proposed methods consist of a recursive determination of electric fields -- using the mathematical principle behind a Fabry-Perot interferometer -- and two different...

Designing interactive demonstrations of optics phenomena

The United Nations and Unesco have declared 2015 to be the international year of light. The Optics department of the faculty of Applied Physics from the TU Delft has decided to contribute to this effort by designing optics experiments to be displayed at the Science Center Delft. The goal of this project was to manage first year students that...