This year, three of our present and past postdocs in the group have obtained faculty positions in India as well as research positions in Croatia and at the CNRS in France. Congratulations to Himadri, Ivor and Nicolas!
The indestructible light beam
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.
Lise Meitner fellowship for Ivor
Ivor Krešić was awarded a Lise-Meitner fellowship by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), which will allow him to continue his successful work as a postdoc in our group. Ivor will primarily work on waves in non-Hermitian media and shall collaborate with our experimental partners on the implementation of his theoretical predictions.
Optimal information about the invisible
Together with Dorian Bouchet and Allard Mosk from the Nanophotonics group at Utrecht University, we demonstrated how to shape the wave-front of a coherent laser beam such as to obtain with it the maximal possible information about a target hidden behind or inside a disordered medium. Our joint work was published in Nature Physics and is described in the following press release compiled by Florian Aigner from the press office at TU Wien (see also highlight in Physics World).
Jakob graduated
Jakob Melchard successfully defended his master thesis – congratulations!
Adaptive control of quantum cascade random lasers
Together with the THz lab at TU Wien we show in a new Nature Communication that quantum cascade random lasers can be adaptively controlled by a suitably shaped infrared beam. Following a control strategy developed by Nicolas Bachelard, an initially multi-mode THz random laser is turned into a tunable single-mode source. Discussions of our work can be found at the Austrian Press Agency, Chemie.de and at Analytica News.
Andre’s PhD defense
Andre Brandstötter successfully defended his PhD on “Photonics with Loss and Disorder” today – congratulations!
The return of the spin echo
Together with a team from the Walther Meißner Institute and TU Munich, we showed in a recent Letter that the conventional Hahn echo pulse sequence from electron spin resonance produces a train of periodic, self-stimulated echoes when the involved spins are strongly coupled to a resonator. See discussions of this work on ChemEurope and on the websites of the Austrian Press Agency and TU Munich.
Michael, Max and Markus defended
Michael Fraller, Maximilian Geismann and Markus Kaczvinszki successfully defended their Master theses – congratulations from all of us!
New Optica paper on non-Hermitian invisibility
In a new paper with Kostas, Ivor and Andre, we demonstrate how a dielectric medium can be made invisible for certain incoming beams when a suitable spatial distribution of gain and loss is added to the medium’s permittivity. (See highlight in Optica top downloads.)
