The UCF approach to aiding Florida's innovation economy is discussed. The approach is to focus on key areas of research that overlap our state's economic development plans, work in partnership with existing high tech industry, and develop our regions innovation economy eco-system. One method of focus is to develop multidisciplinary research and education centers that support existing and emerging economic sectors. One example is CREOL, the Center for Research in Optics and Lasers. We incentivize faculty to make their labs and skills available to regional industry through a matching grants program. We work in partnership with regional governments to develop a network of company incubators with high wage and high growth potential.

The use of non-metallic, nano-element arrays for light trapping in substrate a-Si:H single junction solar cell structures is found to dramatically increase power conversion efficiency. This enhancement is consistent with significant light diffraction from the array into plasmon-polariton modes, photonic modes, or both. However, modeling shows that photonic effects dominate in substrate structures and that the light and carrier collection advantages of such arrays can result in short circuit current densities of 17.3 mA/cm2 for nominally 200nm a-Si:H substrate cells, giving a 56% increase in efficiency over planar 200nm controls while keeping photocarriers within 224nm from a collecting electrode.

According to United Nation, world population may reach 10.1 billion by the year 2100. The fossil fuel based global economy is not sustainable. For sustainable global green energy scenario we must consider free fuel based energy conversion, environmental concerns and conservation of water. Photovoltaics (PV) offers a unique opportunity to solve the 21st century’s electricity generation because solar energy is essentially unlimited and PV systems provide electricity without any undesirable impact on the environment. Innovative paths for green energy conversion and storage are proposed in areas of R and D, manufacturing and system integration, energy policy and financing. With existing silicon PV system manufacturing, the implementation of new innovative energy policies and new innovative business model can provide immediately large capacity of electricity generation to developed, emerging and underdeveloped economies.

Solutions to difficult problems in complex environments frequently require methodical approaches and detailed research plans. Fortunately, there is still room for serendipity in disciplines that are relatively mature and well understood. As a case in point, optical sensors that exploit polarized light have matured greatly and the discipline of optical polarization has grown substantially in scope and applications over the last ten years. In spite of this increased understanding, polarization signatures are frequently not well understood. A good example is polarization in the animal kingdom. The potential for polarimetric monitoring of moose populations, and other applications, will be discussed.

Through evolution, nature came up with many effective solutions to its challenges and continually improving them. By mimicking, coping and being inspired, humans have been using Nature's solutions to address their own challenges. In recent years, the implementation of nature's capabilities has intensified with our growing understanding of the various biological and nastic mechanisms and processes. Successes include even the making of humanlike robots that perform such lifelike tasks as walking, talking, making eye-contact, interpreting speech and facial expressions, as well as many other humanlike functions. Generally, once humans are able to implement a function then, thru rapid advances in technology, capabilities are developed that can significantly exceed the original source of inspiration in Nature. Examples include flight where there is no species that can fly as high, carry so much mass, has so large dimensions and fly so fast, and operate at as such extreme conditions as our aircraft and other aerospace systems. However, using the capabilities of today's technology, there are many challenges that are not feasible to address in mimicking characteristics of species and plants. In this manuscript, state-of-the-art of biomimetic capabilities, potentials and challenges are reviewed.

According to World Health Organization statistics there are approximately 285 million people who are blind, have severe low vision, or are near-blind. Of these, 39 million are blind, and 246 million have low vision problems. About 90% of these live in developing countries. The major causes are uncorrected refractive errors (42%), and cataracts (38%). In the US, there are about 6 million people over the age of 65 who have age-related macular degeneration which is the leading cause of blindness. For each decade after age 40, it is found that there is a three-fold increase in the prevalence of blindness and low vision. This paper will address the question of what can we, as optical physicists and engineers, do? There is a need for efficient methods to detect problems, investigate function, provide solutions, and develop rehabilitation devices for the visually impaired. Here I will sketch out the magnitude and variety of the problem, examples and future research directions.

Complex environments require quality information to make proper decisions. In this paper I will emphasize ladar sensing for complex environments, especially for identification of objects in a complex environment. The right sensor provides data that can easily be converted to desired information. This allows both automated cuing, and possibly even automatic object recognition. Ladar has the most discriminates of any sensor modality. Optical sensors have much higher real beam resolution than microwave sensors. Active sensors have control of the object illumination, which can provide additional information compared to a passive sensor. Because ladar is an active EO sensing modality you have high real beam resolution, and control of the illumination pattern. Ladar can provide a 3D image, grey scale in multiple colors, velocity and vibration information, polarization properties of the object viewed, and even speckle properties of the surface of the viewed object. Also, 3D shape is a mostly invariant discriminate, assisting in high confidence object recognition.

The timing of an innovation is of greater important than its substance. Although the advance of knowledge depends on innovations, the given field must need and be ready to receive the innovation, otherwise it will generally be confined to obscurity. The problem that will mainly concern us here is the detection of very small amounts of optical material and its solution involving the perturbation of surface plasmon coupling resonances. We shall explain and examine some applications of the technique but also take a quick glance back into the history of the resonance, which is rather earlier than is often credited.

Liquid crystals (LCs) demonstrate a number of unusual physical properties and effects that so far has been explored mainly for LC display (LCD) applications. This presentation discusses aspects of LCs that lead to the new opportunities in non-LCD applications, such as biosensors, micro- and opto-fluidics, switchable metamaterials. A LC is a unique medium for colloidal particles as it responds to the presence of inclusions by altering the orientation of LC molecules and thus the optic axis. The effect can be used in real-time sensing of microbes, as the molecular reorientation is easily detectable by optical means. Symmetry breaking associated with director distortions around inclusions in LCs enables a new mechanism of nonlinear electrophoresis. In the liquid-crystal enabled electrophoresis (LCEEP), the velocity of particle grows with the square of the applied field. The feature allows one to use an AC driving, to create steady flows and to move uncharged particle. The trajectory of particle is not necessarily parallel to the electric field and can be controlled by the director configuration. A gradient electric field can be used to align metallic nanorods into ordered LC-like birefringent structures with spatially varying refractive index; the latter represents a switchable medium for transformation optics.

There exists a vast range of optical techniques that have been under development for solving complex measurement problems related to gas-turbine machinery and phenomena. For instance, several optical techniques are ideally suited for studying fundamental combustion phenomena in laboratory environments. Yet other techniques hold significant promise for use as either on-line gas turbine control sensors, or as health monitoring diagnostics sensors. In this paper, we briefly summarize these and discuss, in more detail, some of the latter class of techniques, including phosphor thermometry, hyperspectral imaging and low coherence interferometry, which are particularly suited for control and diagnostics sensing on hot section components with ceramic thermal barrier coatings (TBCs).