Light that twists inside fibers

by Siddharth Ramachandran (ECE Department & Photonics Center, Boston University, MA, USA)

Friday 9 Sept 2016, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

CFEL Building (99), Ground Floor, Seminar Room I (DESY Hamburg)

In the last decade, some of the most extensively studied complex light beams are optical vortices, which possess phase or polarization singularities. These beams are interesting because they resemble the emission patterns of single molecule dipoles, or because they potentially represent an infinite set of eigenstates that can be constructed with light. Their use has been demonstrated in, or proposed for, several applications such as higher-dimensional quantum encryption, information capacity scaling, single-molecule spectroscopy, nano-scale imaging and laser wakefield acceleration. A recently developed fiber that has a ring-shaped core has enabled their stable generation and propagation in optical fibers for distances of up to kilometres. Since fibers are well known for their ability to offer nonlinear and dispersive tailoring of light, this additionally opens the door to studying and exploiting nonlinear phenomena with such beams. This talk will discuss recent results and intriguing possibilities enabled by fiber propagation of beams that have long been considered interesting, but hitherto unstable in nature.