Solitons and Supercontinuum – the 50th Anniversary of the proposal of the optical soliton
Pizzas will be included!
About the Presentation:
It is now fifty years since the proposal of the optical soliton in optical fibre, which initially held great expectations for revolutionizing high-capacity optical communications. Although this has remained somewhat unfulfilled, optical solitons and their concepts have played an important role in ultrashort pulse generation, optical frequency combs, spectroscopic instrumentation and novel broad band sources which have been very successfully commercially exploited. In this presentation I will give a brief introduction to the basics of the optical soliton and describe my group’s work on novel aspects of soliton generation in fibre over the years. This will include the process of soliton Raman generation as well as the role of noise in the generation of solitons and the seeding of modulational instability to initiate soliton evolution where an analogy can be drawn to rogue wave evolution in hydrodynamics. The main focus will be on the role of solitons in supercontinuum or “white light” generation that can be driven by femtosecond, picosecond and continuous wave laser sources.
About the Speaker:
Roy Taylor commenced his research career at the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1971 working on flashlamp-pumped picosecond dye lasers. He established the Femtosecond Optics Group at Imperial College in 1986 and over his career has published more than 400 papers and co-authored over 430 conference presentations. His work and diverse contributions to various aspects of laser research, photonics, ultrafast optics, optical fibres and non-linear optics have been recognised by the Carl Zeiss Research Award, the Institute of Physics Thomas Young and Faraday Medals, in addition to the Royal Society’s Rumford Medal. His current interest are directed at developing wavelength, pulse-width and repetition rate versatile optical sources, at watt level average powers, in all-fibre format for commercialisation and the applications market.