The use of Liquid Crystal (LC) materials, mainly in display applications, has contributed to major advancement in liquid crystal science and technology. New and more complex phases of liquid crystals were developed to compete with conventional nematic LC displays. The challenge now is to manufacture high birefringence liquid crystal materials with low viscosity. LC is also used in many other applications, such as temperature sensors and photonics beam shaping in the form of spatial light modulators (SLM) and q-plates. The first objective of this thesis is to investigate the magic mirror effect using a SLM following Sir Michael Berry’s theory. Here, we demonstrated a simple way of producing the magic mirror effect using LC devices and aimed to use a micron-sized device to shape the phase and polarization of light with gentle phase variation. We were able to generate the magic mirror image intensity pattern, both experimentally and theoretically. This was done by computing and generating the desired phase pattern of an image on the SLM, then aligning light propagation through this phase pattern. The experimental and theoretical results showed good agreement when comparing the produced intensity patterns. In the second part of this thesis, we experimentally investigated the use of structured photons, created using q-plates, which is a birefringent liquid crystal cell of OAM and SAM coupling, in quantum key distribution (QKD) using the BB84 protocol through orbital angular momentum (OAM) maintaining optical fibres. Here, we were successful in generating a secure key between two parties with a quantum bit error rate of 8.6% which is below the security threshold of 11%. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using structured light in QKD through fibres to boost key rates and security.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/43582 |
| Date | 11 May 2022 |
| Creators | Alsaiari, Fatimah |
| Contributors | Karimi, Ebrahim |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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