José Sasián's Image Featured by OPN

José Sasián, Professor of Optical Sciences, recently had his image featured by Optica's Optics & Photonics News (OPN) as both the Image of the Week and on the print copy of OPN.

Describing how he made the image, José said,

In preparing alignment lectures I asked Bob Parks from Optical Perspectives for a diffractive axicon. He had been using them for optical alignment with the Point Source Microscope PSM. In one experiment I illuminated the axicon with a white LED placed at about one meter away from the axicon. When I looked down the axicon I saw the beautiful set of rings, and captured them with my Iphone. 

OPN describes the image saying, "A diffractive axicon under LED illumination produces a system of colorful rings that form nearly Bessel beams." José also explains that the beautiful image is the result of the source light being an LED (not a point source) and the fact that there is a bandwidth, creates a plurality of overlapping colorful—nearly Bessel beams.