Maria L. Calvo

tel: 34 91 394 4684
fax: 34 91 394 4683
E-mail: mlcalvo@fis.ucm.es

Area of Expertise

Light scattering, optical waveguide theory, applications to periodic and aperiodic media (volume holographic gratings), optical signal theory

Biography

Maria L. Calvo graduated in Physics in 1969 at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM, Spain). In 1970 she became a fellow of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. She obtained a Doctorate Diploma from the University of Paris VI in 1971. In 1972 she joined the Optics Department of UCM as an assistant professor and started working on theoretical aspects of scattering of light by defects in isotropic media (Ph.D. dissertation in 1977. In 1981 she became an associate professor and in 1999 obtained the Chair of Optics at the same department. Her main areas of interest are light scattering, optical waveguide theory, applications to periodic and aperiodic media (volume holographic gratings) and optical signal theory. She is also interested in applications in Optical Photoreceptors. She is currently Secretary General of the International Commission for Optics (ICO) and a member of SPIE (Women in Optics core Group).

Lecture Title(s)

Fundamentals of Holographic Data Storage: Diffraction of Light by Volume Holographic Gratings
The mechanism of optical writing and reading of information resides on the diffraction of light by volume holographic gratings. The formulation is based on the propagation and diffraction of a classical field in a periodical medium as a solution of the propagation differential equation. The vectorial nature of light plays an important role to analyze the scalar approximation, and to define the various regimes of diffraction such as Raman-Nath, Bragg and the most general one based upon scattering of light. Various important parameters are defined from these formalisms. A comparative study with diffraction by other type of beams such us neutrons, X-ray and others leads to a global understanding of the phenomenon.