Topic: Spatiotemporal Nonlinear Waves in Multimode optical Systems

Logan G. Wright, Cornell University and NTT Research, Inc.

Host: Professor Wei Xiaoming

Presentation time: 8:30 PM, Friday, September 10, 2021

Zoom:

https://us05web.zoom.us/j/89485291694?pwd=YlI0K29hMVJJL2ZSTDdOd2FHbjc5QT09

Conference id: 894 8529 1694

Password: i4qK7h

School of Physics and Optoelectronics

August 31, 2021

   Report Summary: When waves propagate in a medium whose response is nonlinear, particle-like wave packets called solitons can form. Solitons arise due to a dynamic balance of nonlinear and linear processes. Usually, this balance is disrupted by other effects, leading to a microworld of emergent behaviors among soliton-like pulses, including births, bound complexes, deaths, adaptations, and competitions. Solitons have captivated mathematicians and physicists for centuries, and have become indispensable in designing and explaining the physics of ultrafast optical pulses, such as occur in passively mode-locked lasers and microresonators (i.e., mode-locked frequency combs). In this talk, I will discuss our work examining soliton-like pulses of light in multimode waveguides and multimode lasers. While solitons in one-dimensional systems, such as optical fibers with a single spatial mode, systems relatively stable, they are very constrained, limiting the complexity of solitonic phenomena. Solitons in higher-dimensional settings like three-dimensional bulk optical media are, on the other hand, too free: once formed they usually quickly fall apart. In multimode waveguides and cavities, solitons exist in a happy medium: An 'interdimensional' setting in which slow more complex soliton behaviors can occur than in either 1D or fully 3D environments. I will explain a few of the diverse ways multimode solitons can form, break apart and explode, and the competition of multimode dissipative solitons in the resource-limited environment of a multimode laser cavity. These observations inspire several routes to designing powerful new kinds of lasers and coherent light sources by exploiting spatiotemporal soliton physics in multimoded laser cavities and waveguides.

  Brief Introduction of speaker: I received my PhD from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY, USA) in 2018, where I was advised by Frank Wise and studied the physics of nonlinear optical wave propagation and mode-locked lasers. From 2018-2019, I was a Postdoctoral researcher in Hideo Mabuchi's Group at Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA, USA). studying multimode quantum nonlinear optics and quantum information. In 2019, I joined Peter McMahon's New Research Group at Cornell and Collaborating With NTT Research's Physics and Informatics Laboratory directed by Yoshihisa Yamamoto. My research interests include multimode photonics, the physics of computation, Quantum Information Science.