Highlights

• UCF Professor of Optics and Photonics Guifang Li is leading a five-year, $19.2 million Army Research Office-funded program to advance the understanding and control of light traveling through complex environments.

• The multi-institutional team will combine optical sensing, computational imaging, inverse methods and artificial intelligence to explore ways to measure and correct distortions in light.

• The award will support the next chapter of UCF's Townes Laser Institute while providing research and training opportunities for students across participating universities.

A UCF-led research team will receive a $19.2 million, five-year award from the U.S. Army Research Office to investigate how light travels through complex, changing environments - and how researchers can control it.

Led by Guifang Li, a professor in UCF's College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL), the program brings together researchers from CREOL and UCF's College of Engineering and Computer Science, the University of Dayton and the University of California, Berkeley, alongside industry partners.

The award will also support a new chapter for CREOL's Townes Laser Institute under Li's leadership. Established at CREOL in 2007 and named for Nobel laureate and laser pioneer Charles Townes, the institute advances laser technologies and their potential applications. Li plans to expand its focus on multidisciplinary projects that apply advances in lasers and photonics to practical challenges.

"Townes Laser Institute will translate multidisciplinary scientific advances into solutions that aspire to benefit society as profoundly as the laser itself, to honor the legacy of Charles Townes," Li says.

Understanding Light in the Real World

Light traveling through the real world rarely behaves as it does in an ideal laboratory.

Atmospheric turbulence, scattering materials, biological tissue and other complex media can scramble an optical wave, degrade an image or prevent light from being precisely delivered to a desired location. The new program seeks to develop ways to measure these distortions remotely and correct them rapidly, particularly when a sensor, beacon or other measurement device cannot be placed at the far end of the optical path.

Although partly motivated by challenges involving directed-energy systems, the research could also inform imaging through biological tissue, laser-based medicine, remote sensing and free-space optical communications.

"We are interested in a very fundamental problem: How do you understand and control light when the environment between you and where you want the light to go is unknown, changing and inaccessible?" Li says. "That question appears in many different forms - from atmospheric propagation to looking through scattering tissue. If we can develop new ways to measure the optical environment and adapt to it in real time, the underlying science could have an impact across many fields."

Learning About an Environment from the Light Itself

One of the program's central questions is whether researchers can determine what happened to light during its journey without directly accessing the other end of its path.

One group of techniques will examine the extremely small amount of light naturally scattered back as an optical wave travels through a medium. By combining coherent optical measurements with advanced computational methods, the team will study whether these weak returning signals can reveal how conditions vary along the optical path.

Other approaches will use carefully designed patterns of light and mathematical inverse methods to simultaneously learn about an unknown object and the medium obscuring it.

The team will also explore using artificial intelligence to analyze optical measurements and gain a better understanding of complex environments.

Correcting Distortions in Complex Media

Understanding how light has been distorted creates a second challenge: How can the distortion be undone?

The team will investigate multi-plane light conversion, which manipulates an optical wave across a series of controllable planes rather than relying on a single optical element to correct complex distortions.

In principle, the approach could give researchers greater control over both the amplitude and phase of an optical field, allowing a system to address distortions that conventional single-plane methods cannot easily correct.

For light traveling through the atmosphere, the technique could provide new ways to compensate for rapidly changing turbulence. Related principles could help researchers recover images obscured by biological tissue or improve the precision with which lasers deliver light through complex biological environments.

UCF Professor of Optics and Photonics Guifang Li and doctoral student Matin Dehghani work in Li's lab. (Photo by Antoine Hart)

Bringing Optics and Computation Together

The program combines traditionally separate fields, including coherent optical sensing, computational imaging, inverse methods, artificial intelligence, adaptive optics and programmable photonics, to investigate systems capable of characterizing and adapting to a complex optical environment.

The multidisciplinary approach also reflects Li's vision for the Townes Laser Institute: bringing researchers together to develop solutions for specific applications.

Preparing the Next Generation of Optical Scientists

The program will also train students from UCF, the University of Dayton and UC Berkeley to work across optical physics, photonics, computation and engineering. Students will gain experience in optical sensing, wavefront control, computational imaging, artificial intelligence and advanced photonic systems.

"An award of this scale gives us an unusual opportunity not only to pursue ambitious scientific questions, but also to train students across institutions and disciplines," Li says. "The students will learn to think about optics as a complete system - combining physics, devices, computation and experiments. That workforce development is an important part of the program."

Moving Discoveries Beyond the Laboratory

Industry partners will explore potential applications for discoveries emerging from the research.

Meadowlark Optics Inc., Caelight Inc. and Holodyne LLC will help commercialize technologies emerging from the research. Texas Instruments will support the program by providing the research team with prototypes of microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, before they become publicly available.

"This award reflects UCF's growing leadership in optics and photonics and demonstrates the impact that fundamental university research can have on technologies of national importance," CREOL Dean David Hagan says. "Just as importantly, the program will educate the next generation of scientists and engineers needed to advance these technologies."

This research is supported by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory through the Army Research Office under award number W911NF262A129.

More Topics

College of Engineering and Computer Science Research College of Optics and Photonics physics artificial intelligence

UCF Researcher Harnesses AI to Help Older Adults Thrive in a Tech-Driven World

UCF Researcher Identifies 10 Potential Treatments for Rare Nerve Tumor in Children

How to Impress on Your Job Interview

UCF Faculty Help Shape the Future of Human-Machine Communication as Emerging Field Earns International Recognition

UCF FinTech-AI Lab Is Shaping AI Talent

25 of UCF's Fastest-Growing Alumni-Led Companies

UCF Professor Paves the Way for the Promising Future of Special Education

The Dawn of Neuro-Accounting