{"id":155882,"date":"2026-10-13T09:00:22","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T13:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=155882"},"modified":"2026-10-12T13:33:43","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T17:33:43","slug":"ucf-led-team-receives-19-2-million-army-research-office-award-to-advance-the-science-of-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/ucf-led-team-receives-19-2-million-army-research-office-award-to-advance-the-science-of-light\/","title":{"rendered":"UCF-Led Team Receives $19.2 Million Army Research Office Award to Advance the Science of Light"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A UCF-led research<\/a> team will receive a $19.2 million, five-year award from the U.S. Army Research Office to investigate how light travels through complex, changing environments \u2014 and how researchers can control it.<\/p>\n

Led by Guifang Li, a professor in UCF\u2019s College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL)<\/a>, the program brings together researchers from CREOL and UCF\u2019s College of Engineering and Computer Science<\/a>, the University of Dayton and the University of California, Berkeley, alongside industry partners.<\/p>\n

The award will also support a new chapter for CREOL\u2019s Townes Laser Institute under Li\u2019s leadership. Established at CREOL in 2007 and named for Nobel laureate and laser pioneer Charles Townes, the institute advances laser technologies and their potential applications. Li plans to expand its focus on multidisciplinary projects that apply advances in lasers and photonics to practical challenges.<\/p>\n

\u201cTownes 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,\u201d Li says.<\/p>\n

Understanding Light in the Real World<\/h2>\n

Light traveling through the real world rarely behaves as it does in an ideal laboratory.<\/p>\n

Atmospheric turbulence, scattering materials, biological tissue and other complex media can scramble an optical wave, degrade an image or prevent light from being precisely delivered to a desired location. The new program seeks to develop ways to measure these distortions remotely and correct them rapidly, particularly when a sensor, beacon or other measurement device cannot be placed at the far end of the optical path.<\/p>\n

Although partly motivated by challenges involving directed-energy systems, the research could also inform imaging through biological tissue, laser-based medicine, remote sensing and free-space optical communications.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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?\u201d Li says. \u201cThat question appears in many different forms \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Learning About an Environment from the Light Itself<\/h2>\n

One of the program\u2019s central questions is whether researchers can determine what happened to light during its journey without directly accessing the other end of its path.<\/p>\n

One group of techniques will examine the extremely small amount of light naturally scattered back as an optical wave travels through a medium. By combining coherent optical measurements with advanced computational methods, the team will study whether these weak returning signals can reveal how conditions vary along the optical path.<\/p>\n

Other approaches will use carefully designed patterns of light and mathematical inverse methods to simultaneously learn about an unknown object and the medium obscuring it.<\/p>\n

The team will also explore using artificial intelligence to analyze optical measurements and gain a better understanding of complex environments.<\/p>\n

Correcting Distortions in Complex Media<\/h2>\n

Understanding how light has been distorted creates a second challenge: How can the distortion be undone?<\/p>\n

The team will investigate multi-plane light conversion, which manipulates an optical wave across a series of controllable planes rather than relying on a single optical element to correct complex distortions.<\/p>\n

In principle, the approach could give researchers greater control over both the amplitude and phase of an optical field, allowing a system to address distortions that conventional single-plane methods cannot easily correct.<\/p>\n

For light traveling through the atmosphere, the technique could provide new ways to compensate for rapidly changing turbulence. Related principles could help researchers recover images obscured by biological tissue or improve the precision with which lasers deliver light through complex biological environments.
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