Alexander Schumer successfully defended his PhD thesis on “Exceptional Physics near non-Hermitian Degeneracies” – congratulations! Many thanks go to Ulf Peschel and Iacopo Carusotto for serving as external referees.
A motion freezer for many particles
Our work on cooling multiple levitated particles with wavefront shaping has jointly been published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review A. The two articles were selected for coverage in Physics and received the PRA Editors’ Suggestion. Special thanks go to Jakob and Nicolas for a lot of work in a long but rewarding process!
Ivor receives ESQ discovery grant
Ivor Krešić, our Lise-Meitner postdoctoral fellow, received a Discovery Grant from the Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Quantum Science and Technology (ESQ) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Congratulations!
Michael defended his PhD
Michael Horodynski successfully defended his PhD thesis on “Scattering in Complex Environments: Theory, Wavefront Shaping and System Design” – congratulations! Many thanks also to Owen Miller and Frank Scheffold for serving as external referees.
Top 10 breakthroughs of the year
Two of our works, published together with the groups of Matthieu Davy (in Nature) and of Ori Katz (in Science), were selected jointly for the Top 10 breakthroughs of the year 2022 by PhysicsWorld. Thanks to everyone involved!
Elena defended her PhD
Elena Redchenko from Johannes Fink’s group at IST Austria successfully defended her PhD – congratulations! The experiment she carried out based on theoretical suggestions from our group will be presented in a joint publication that is currently in preparation.
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 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!
Summer lecture on the quantum vacuum
Ulf Leonhardt from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel is currently visiting us as a guest professor and giving a lecture on the “quantum vacuum” – a topic to which he has made several seminal contributions. Welcome Ulf!
Waves in the maze without return
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.