UCF Wins $19.2 Million Army Award to Tame Light in Turbulent, Complex Environments

Light is the most obedient of physical phenomena inside a laboratory, where beams travel through clean air, bounce off precisely aligned mirrors and arrive exactly where engineers intend them to go. Outside the lab, however, light must contend with a far messier reality: shimmering atmospheric turbulence, scattering fog, churning biological tissue and countless other complex media that scramble an optical wave, blur an image or prevent a laser from ever reaching its intended target. A new five-year, $19.2 million research program led by the University of Central Florida aims to confront that problem head-on, developing fundamental new ways to understand, measure and ultimately control light as it travels through environments that are unknown, changing and largely inaccessible.

The award comes from the U.S. Army Research Office and will support a collaboration anchored at UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics, known internationally as CREOL. The program is led by Guifang Li, a professor of optics and photonics at CREOL, and brings together researchers from CREOL and UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, along with partners at the University of Dayton and the University of California, Berkeley. Industry participants, including Meadowlark Optics Inc., Caelight Inc., Holodyne LLC and Texas Instruments, will work alongside the academic teams to explore how discoveries made during the program might move beyond the laboratory and into real-world technologies. The research is supported by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory through the Army Research Office under award number W911NF262A129.

Beyond its scientific ambitions, the award will also fund a new chapter for CREOL’s Townes Laser Institute, which Li will lead. Established at CREOL in 2007 and named for Nobel laureate and laser pioneer Charles Townes, the institute has long advanced laser technologies and their applications across fields ranging from manufacturing to medicine. Li plans to broaden its portfolio toward multidisciplinary projects that translate advances in lasers and photonics into practical solutions. “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. The statement captures the scale of the ambition: a technology as transformative as the laser is a demanding benchmark for any research program.

The scientific heart of the program lies in a deceptively simple question. “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.” The phrasing matters. In many practical scenarios, a sensor, beacon or other measurement device simply cannot be placed at the far end of the optical path, which means the system must learn about the distortions it faces using only the light that returns to it.

One family of techniques the team will pursue exploits an extremely small fraction of light that is naturally scattered backward as an optical wave propagates through a medium. This faint returning signal, ordinarily dismissed as noise, carries information about the conditions the wave encountered along its journey. By combining coherent optical measurements — which preserve information about the phase of light, not just its intensity — with advanced computational methods, the researchers will investigate whether these weak backscattered signals can be decoded to reveal how conditions vary along the optical path. In effect, the goal is to turn the stray light that every optical system sheds into a distributed sensor for the environment itself, allowing a system to characterize turbulence or scattering it cannot directly probe.

A second set of approaches attacks the problem from a different angle, using carefully engineered patterns of light paired with mathematical inverse methods. Inverse problems, a staple of computational imaging, involve working backward from measured data to infer the hidden causes that produced it. Here the challenge is especially thorny because two unknowns are entangled: the properties of the object being observed and the properties of the medium obscuring it. By illuminating a scene with structured light whose properties are deliberately designed, and by applying inverse algorithms to the resulting measurements, the team aims to simultaneously reconstruct both the unknown object and the distorting medium. The program will also harness artificial intelligence to analyze optical measurements, using machine learning to extract structure from data that would overwhelm conventional analysis and to build a better understanding of complex environments in real time.

Understanding a distortion, however, is only half the battle; undoing it is a separate and equally demanding challenge. To that end, the team will investigate a technique known as multi-plane light conversion. Conventional adaptive optics systems typically rely on a single corrective optical element, such as a deformable mirror, to undo the damage a wave has suffered. Multi-plane light conversion instead manipulates an optical wave across a series of controllable planes, allowing the correction to be distributed in depth. In principle, this architecture gives researchers far greater authority over both the amplitude and the phase of an optical field — the two properties that together fully describe a light wave — enabling a system to address distortions that single-plane methods cannot easily correct. For light traveling through the atmosphere, the technique could offer new ways to compensate for turbulence that changes from one instant to the next, while related principles could help recover images hidden behind biological tissue or sharpen the delivery of laser light through complex biological environments for medical applications.

Although the program is partly motivated by challenges involving directed-energy systems, where delivering a high-quality laser beam through kilometers of turbulent air is a central concern, the underlying science radiates outward into many domains. Imaging through biological tissue could benefit from the same mathematics of scattering and correction, opening doors in optical diagnostics and laser-based medicine. Remote sensing platforms could extract more information from the faint light they collect. Free-space optical communications, which beam data through the air between ground stations, aircraft and satellites, depend on precisely the kind of real-time environmental awareness and wavefront correction the program seeks to develop. The breadth of these applications explains why the U.S. Army Research Office has made a commitment of this scale: the same physics that scrambles a laser link also blurs a telescope image and fogs a medical scan.

The program’s structure reflects a deliberate fusion of disciplines that have traditionally lived apart. Coherent optical sensing, computational imaging, inverse methods, artificial intelligence, adaptive optics and programmable photonics will all be brought to bear on systems capable of characterizing and adapting to complex optical environments. This multidisciplinary approach also mirrors Li’s vision for the Townes Laser Institute as a place where researchers converge to build solutions for specific applications rather than pursuing narrow technical questions in isolation. The combination is increasingly the norm in modern photonics, where breakthroughs often emerge not from a single clever device but from the interplay of physics, algorithms and hardware designed to work together as a coherent system.

Training the next generation of optical scientists is woven into the program from the start. Students from UCF, the University of Dayton and UC Berkeley will gain hands-on experience across optical sensing, wavefront control, computational imaging, artificial intelligence and advanced photonic systems, learning to move fluidly between optical physics, computation and engineering. “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.” Industry partners will help carry discoveries toward commercialization, with Texas Instruments supplying 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,” says CREOL Dean David Hagan. “Just as importantly, the program will educate the next generation of scientists and engineers needed to advance these technologies.” If the program succeeds, the light that reaches its destination through a turbulent world will do so because researchers finally learned to read the message the environment writes into every scattered photon — and to write a correction back.

Subject of Research: Controlling light propagation through turbulent and complex optical environments

Article Title: UCF awarded $19.2 million to study light in complex environments

Article References: UCF awarded $19.2 million to study light in complex environments. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: optics, photonics, UCF, CREOL, Townes Laser Institute, atmospheric turbulence, adaptive optics, wavefront control, computational imaging, artificial intelligence, free-space optical communications, Army Research Office