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!
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 Today, Physics 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!
In a new publication in Nature, we demonstrate that a disordered medium can be made fully transmitting to all incoming waves by placing a suitably tailored complementary medium in front of it. This project was implemented in a fruitful collaboration with the experimental group of Matthieu Davy in Rennes (France). For more information check out the press releases of TU Wien and of Rennes University. Here are also articles in Physics World and in Optics & Photonics News as well as a YouTube video on our work.
Our roadmap article on “Wavefront Shaping and Deep Imaging in Complex Media” has just been published online in JPhys Photonics. This piece involved 45 authors from 36 institutions in 12 countries – many thanks go to Sylvain Gigan and Ori Katz for coordinating this roadmap!
In collaboration with the group of Alexander Szameit from Rostock University, we present the first experimental observation of photonic constant-intensity waves in a system of coupled optical fibre loops. From our group, Ivor Krešić was the main driving force behind this project that has now been published in Science Advances – congratulations!
In a new publication in Nature with colleagues in California and in Florida, we present the first time-resolved measurement of the chiral state transfer for parameter variations that exclude an exceptional point. From our group, Alex Schumer was the one most involved in this project – congratulations!
Our work on “Transforming Space with Non-Hermitian Dielectrics” was selected as the cover article of Physical Review Letters. Many thanks go to Ivor Krešić, who first-authored this paper and prepared the figure, and to our collaborators Ulf Leonhardt (Weizmann) and Kostas Makris (Heraklion).
Together with the teams of Mercedeh Khajavikhan, Demetri Christodoulides and Patrick LiKamWa we showed how to create topological lasing modes in a laser cavity that steers light around an exceptional point. Congratulations to Alexander Schumer, who spent several months with our partner groups in the US and now serves as the first author of a joint paper in Science. See also the news highlight in Laser Focus World and the press release from TU Wien.
Three letters involving our group have just been published in the Physical Review. The topics range from atomic frequency combs, an invariance property of the Fisher information, to the optimal detection of targets in complex media. Many thanks go to our collaborators in France, India, Germany and in the Netherlands.
Together with the team of Allard Mosk at Utrecht University, we published a paper in Nature Photonics in which we introduce the concept of “scattering-invariant modes”. These special light waves have the property that they produce the same light pattern in the far-field, irrespective of whether a strongly scattering medium is put in their way or not (see image on the left). Find out more about these indestructible beams of light in the news highlight on Physics World or in the freely available version of the article.
