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

New review on “Shaping the propagation of light in complex media”

Nature Physics featured in its September issue an Insight collection dedicated to “Complex Optics” and invited several teams to provide their input to this focus issue. Together with Hui Cao and Allard Mosk we contributed a review article on “Shaping the propagation of light in complex media” that has now been published here. Many thanks go to Hui and Allard for the great collaborative effort and to Nina Meinzer and her team for putting this issue together!

The perfect trap for light

Together with the team of Ori Katz at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem we just published a paper in Science on how to trick light into getting perfectly absorbed even in a weakly absorbing layer. The idea is to put a degenerate cavity around the absorber, which uses interference to prevent any light from escaping this absorbing trap of light. The article has been highlighted in a very elegant Perspective article written by Jacopo Bertolotti, as well as in Physics TodayPhysics World, in the New Scientist and in the APS Physics Magazine. From our team, Helmut Hörner was in charge of simulating the complex interference in this device. Thanks to all for the excellent collaboration!