Welcome

This is the website of the Rotter group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). Our main scientific interests are the propagation of waves through complex media, non-Hermitian physics and theoretical quantum optics.

News and latest research

Resonant physics of open photonic time crystals

Scientific publication

A joint paper with colleagues from Graz and Cardiff has just appeared in Laser & Photonics Reviews. In this work, we develop a resonant-state theory for finite photonic systems that are periodically modulated in time. While these photonic time crystals are often discussed in terms of bulk bandgaps, realistic implementations are finite and open. We show that their dynamics is governed by resonant states (quasinormal modes), revealing how parametric amplification emerges as a resonant process. Congratulations to Adrià, Sergei, David, Egor, Thomas and everyone involved!

BBC Crowd Science

News coverage

The BBC podcast series “Crowd Science” picked up a question from listener Ahmed from Libya who asks whether light can be cancelled with light. In the corresponding interviews, the editors also want to know whether our work on the “anti-laser” can solve this problem. If you’re interested, check out the podcast.

Helmut defended his PhD

Academic degree

Helmut Hörner successfully defended his PhD on “Spectrally and Spatially Degenerate Coherent Perfect Absorbers and a Renormalization-Free Model for Casimir Forces” – congratulations! Many thanks go to Li Ge (CUNY) and Tsampikos Kottos (Wesleyan) for serving as referees for the thesis. Li even made it all the way from NY City to be there in person for the defense (see photo).

EPS QEOD prize for research into the science of light

Prize

At the recent NanoMeta conference in Seefeld (Tyrol), Stefan received the EPS QEOD prize for research into the science of light together with our collaborators Allard Mosk (NL) and Dorian Bouchet (F) for “pioneering research establishing the fundamental limits of information and precision in electromagnetic scattering, leading to a quantitative understanding of how light carries and processes information.”