Nirmal Kumar Viswanathan, faculty in the School of Physics, University of Hyderabad (UoH), has received a United States patent for ‘System and Method for generating an Optical Vector Vortex Beam having two Lobes’ along with Kavita Vemuri of IIIT-Hyderabad.
The US patent (US 8437588 B2) filed in 2010 was assigned on May 7, 2013 to the University of Hyderabad.
The invention deals with generation and manipulation of optical vector-vortex beam – optical beams whose state of polarization varies in the beam cross-section due to coupled phase variation and are generated controllably using commercially available few-mode optical fiber. Such phase-polarization structured optical beams, under the broad research area of singular optics, are enablers in a variety of applications including optical tweezer / manipulator, structure-free nano-plasmonics, spin-optics, achieve tunable optical angular momentum, to name a few and are forging ahead in opening several new areas of research as well.
Dr. Nirmal, a former Ph.D. student of the University of Hyderabad is currently teaching in the School of Physics and is also the head of the Beam Optics and Applications Group. The main area of research of this group covers the field of classical optical beams – generation, characteristics and propagation – including Bessel-type non-diffracting beams, optical beams with embedded edge and point phase singularities and polarization singularities.