Applied Physics Seminar
Murat Yessenov, College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL), University of Central Florida
Date : Friday, 9/8/23
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: YQI Seminar Room or via Zoom
Zoom Link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/99097692977?pwd=ckhwV1NGOHBQNHl1RzdraHlVM21rZz09
Password: 407077
Space-time optics: a new frontier in structuring light fields
To date, the field of optics has been neatly partitioned into distinct communities, each specializing in the manipulation of specific aspects of light: its spatial degrees-of-freedom (DoF) and its temporal DoF. Indeed, many fundamental concepts and results in optics implicitly assume that an optical field is separable in space and time. Very recently, joint manipulation of the spatial and temporal DoF has been shown to yield exotic features when freely propagating or interacting with optical materials. One particularly intriguing example of the rapidly growing family of spatio-temporally structured light fields – space-time wave packets (STWPs) – exhibit some surprising and useful optical behaviors, thereby opening up a new frontier for the study of structured light. In the first half of my talk, I will delve into the underlying physics of STWPs and showcase its exotic attributes through few specific examples. Particularly, I will share our results on engineering optical vacuum using STWPs – assigning arbitrary magnitude, sign and order of optical dispersion in free space, and its potential application in nonlinear optics and quantum optics. In addition, I will present a novel methodology of spatio-temporal light shaping that allows structuring optical fields with tightly correlated spatial, temporal and polarization DoF of light, broadening the area of potential applications that could benefit from STWPs.
In the second half of the seminar, I will talk about a novel method for compact spectral analysis via a new optical component – rotated chirped volume Bragg grating (r-CBG) – with compact footprint capable of spatially resolving the spectra without need for subsequent free-space propagation. I will elucidate the advantages of the r-CBG over traditional surface grating-based spectral analysis and showcase its applications in diverse areas such as compact spectrometry, pulse shaping, and spatio-temporal light manipulation. Finally, I will provide insights into the physical characteristics and specifications of our proof-of-concept r-CBG-based miniaturized spectrometer, while also outlining potential avenues for its further enhancement.
Bio:
Murat Yessenov is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL), University of Central Florida, Orlando. His research focuses on spatio-temporally structured light fields in the context of free-space communication, nonlinear optics, and spectroscopy. Murat received a B.Sc. in Physics from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan in 2017, and Ph. D in Optics from The College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL), UCF in 2022. He is a recipient of The Laser Technology, Engineering, and Applications Scholarship from SPIE (2022), Boris P. Stoicheff Memorial Scholarship from Optica (2022), CREOL Student of Year award (2022), and Emil Wolf Outstanding Student Paper award (2020). Murat co-authored over 40 journal articles and over 40 conference proceedings.
Host: Logan Wright