Welcome to the website of Oriol Arteaga. Here you will mostly hear about my research activities which mainly focus in polarimetry, ellipsometry or, more in general, in light-matter interactions. You can contact me at oarteaga(AT)ub.edu and at www.ub.edu/plat
When I was a PhD student I remember I often wondered why circular dichroism (CD) was measured only in transmission. At that time I was already familiar with ellipsometry measurements (in reflection) that are typically used to determine the dielectric function of materials and I did not understand why optical activity, arguably also a optical property…
“Optical activity produces a differential absorption or refraction according to the handedness of circular polarized light, but the inverse is not necessarily true: a differential absorption of refraction of circular polarized light does not imply optical activity” This simple statement has been sometimes overseen and there exist some confusion among researchers studying optical activity in several fields of…
This week I participated in the 9th Workshop on Ellipsometry hosted by the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. I was invited there to give a tutorial talk on Mueller matrix polarimetry. Here you can download the slides of the presentation in PPTX or PDF formats.
For over a year and a half I have been working on Mueller matrix microscopy. Now I can say that I have no doubts that, when it is properly implemented, Mueller matrix microscopy is nothing but the perfect upgrade for polarization microscopy. I know polarization microscopy is not the most trendy technique in these days, but polarization…
It is time to welcome 2015. This New Year should be specially interesting for us since it is the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies. The International Year of Light is a global initiative adopted by the United Nations to raise awareness of how optical technologies promote sustainable development and provide solutions to worldwide challenges in…
In the last few months a good part of my research has been about Mueller matrix microscopy. We have developed a new MM microscope that uses a dual rotating compensator setup and digital demodulation. The spatial resolution and measurement quality is really good. See related publications here and here. This week we have published a…
For some reason I cannot fully understand, certain types of serial decompositions of Mueller matrices became quite popular among experimentalists. I am talking about the polar decomposition and the Lu-Chipman decompositions. These matrix decompositions allow to decompose a matrix in a series of a retarder, a diattenuator and, eventually, also a depolarizer. Of course matrix…
I took these two pictures last week in the lab. Too amazing for not sharing. (click on the image to enlarge) These are three Cetonia Aurata beetles showing different cuticle colors. Can you anticipate how their Mueller matrix looks like?
During 2014-2015 I will be working on a European Marie Curie IIF project, titled Polarimetric characterization of natural and artificial chiral anisotropic media (Nanochirality) at University of Barcelona.
Not many updates lately! I hope this semester I will manage to keep the website more up-to-date. I also want to add a section with some new scientific content in the form of a tutorial, let’s see if I find the time. For the moment today I have updated the publication list in the lazy…