Lifeboat Foundation

A technology behind 3D holograms might encrypt data for quantum computers.

Physics is on the brink of peering more deeply into nature’s foundations than ever before.

The four dimensions of spacetime that we experience could be like a hologram projected by a three-dimensional quantum state.

Star Trek’s famous holodeck is a virtual reality stage that simulates any object in 3D as if they were real. However, 3D holographic projection has never been realized. A team of scientists from Bilkent University, Turkey, has now demonstrated the first realistic 3D holograms that can be viewed from any angle.

Holograms are a staple in science fiction, but creating ones detailed enough to have serious applications in the real world has proved difficult. While scientists have been slowly pushing the field of holographic projection forward, they haven’t been able to overcome a problem called cross-talk. However, in a recent paper published in Nature, they have been able to manipulate the shape of light to overcome this, thus allowing them to produce 3D holograms that are orders of magnitude clearer, larger, and more detailed.

What Are Holograms?

Simple holograms are 2D surfaces that produce the illusion of a 3D object when light is shined through it.

Continue reading “Solving a Math Problem Just Brought Holograms Closer to Reality” »

Researchers from Osaka University have developed a technique for improving accuracy of laser beam shaping and wavefront obtained by conventional methods with no additional cost by optimizing virtual phase grating. The results of their research were published in Scientific Reports.

A high quality square flattop beam is in demand for various fields, such as uniform laser processing and medicine, as well as ultrahigh intensity laser applications for accelerators and nuclear fusion. Beam shape is key to realizing the laser’s potential abilities and effects. However, since beam shape and wavefront vary by laser, beam shaping is essential for producing the desired shapes to respond to various needs.

Static and adaptive beam shaping methods have been developed for various applications. With Diffractive Optical Element (DOE) as a static method, edge steepness and flatness are low and wavefront becomes deformed after shaping. (Figure 1 (a)) In addition, computer-generated hologram (CGH) as a typical adaptive method has the same difficulties.

Continue reading “Quality of laser beam shaping can be enhanced at no extra cost” »

Holograms. Emotive, life-like digital human beings. Washing machine repairs directed from miles away.

The rollout of 5G wireless networks that will continue throughout 2019 and beyond promises a slew of new smartphones that will hum along much faster than the models they’ll eventually replace. But while zippier handsets compatible with the next generation of wireless are surely welcome, 5G’s potential extends beyond them.

Verizon, and some of the entrepreneurial startups it is working with, recently demonstrated a few of the fresh consumer and business experiences made possible or enhanced by 5G, at its 5G Lab in New York City, one of five such labs around the country.

Get ready for images projected in mid-air to start appearing in the next few years.

Holography is a powerful tool that can reconstruct wavefronts of light and combine the fundamental wave properties of amplitude, phase, polarization, wave vector and frequency. Smart multiplexing techniques (multiple signal integration) together with metasurface designs are currently in high demand to explore the capacity to engineer information storage systems and enhance optical encryption security using such metasurface holograms.

Holography based on metasurfaces is a promising candidate for applications in optical displays/storage with enormous information bearing capacity alongside a large field of view compared to traditional methods. To practically realize metasurface holograms, holographic profiles should be encoded on ultrathin nanostructures that possess strong light-matter interactions (plasmonic interactions) in an ultrashort distance. Metasurfaces can control light and acoustic waves in a manner not seen in nature to provide a flexible and compact platform and realize a variety of vectorial holograms, with high dimensional information that surpass the limits of liquid crystals or optical photoresists.

Among the existing techniques employed to achieve highly desired optical properties, polarization multiplexing (multiple signal integration) is an attractive method. The strong cross-talk associated with such platforms can, however, be prevented with birefringent metasurfaces (two-dimensional surfaces with two different refractive indices) composed of a single meta-atom per unit-cell for optimized polarization multiplexing.

Continue reading “Multichannel vectorial holographic display and encryption” »

In the latest campaign to reconcile Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics, many physicists are studying how a higher dimensional space that includes gravity arises like a hologram from a lower dimensional particle theory.