During the last months international news have reported vastly about the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, which crashed against  the fierce negative of the Spain government to hold an official referendum about the subject, as it was done in Scotland not long ago. These months the controversy has escalated to a new level and, sadly, now part of Catalan Government is in prison and another part is in Brussels and they would be arrested if they entered Spain. I will not write more about this, as I want to focus on about how research is handled in Spain and Catalonia, but maybe this is demonstrating how a country that cannot handle politics cannot handle either research.

The following graphs show the evolution of investment in research in Spain in the period 2009-2016 and compared to other EU countries.

Source: elpais

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Young’s double slit experiment is one of the most famous experiments in Physics. It played a major role in the discussion of the wave-particle duality of light and it is also usually used to explain several basic concepts of Quantum Mechanics.

When the experiment is made with polarized light, the well-known result is that the interference pattern fades out if the slits are labeled with orthogonal polarization states. Beyond this simple statement we have developed some tools that allow for a complete understanding of Young’s double slit experiment from the perspective of Polarimetry. I have summarized this topic in a presentation I recently made in the AVS 64th international conference.  You can visualize or download it here.

[gview file=”https://www.mmpolarimetry.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/AVSFlorida_OriolArteaga.pdf”]

This presetantion is (at least partly) related to our recent papers:

• Mueller matrix polarimetry on a Young’s double-slit experiment analog  Opt. Lett. (2017)
• On the equivalence between Young’s double-slit and crystal double-refraction interference experiments.  JOSA A (2017)
• Formalism of optical coherence and polarization based on material media states, Phys. Rev. A (2017)
• Vector and matrix states for Mueller matrices of nondepolarizing optical media, JOSA A (2016)