Miro Erkintalo | |
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| Born | Pori, Finland |
| Alma mater | Tampere University of Technology (BSc, MSc, DSc) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Nonlinear optics Laser physics |
| Institutions | |
Miro Erkintalo is a New Zealand physicist specialising in nonlinear optics and laser physics, based at the University of Auckland.
Erkintalo was born and grew up in Pori, Finland, with an interest in science and maths. He attended the Tampere University of Technology intending to get his MSc and become a teacher or technologist, but after interning in a research lab decided to become a physicist. [1] He completed three degrees in succession: a BSc (March 2009), an MSc (November 2009) and Doctor of Science in Physics (January 2012). [2]
After his PhD, Erkintalo came to New Zealand in 2012 to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Auckland, at the suggestion of his mentor John Dudley. [1] [3] He had intended to just stay for two years, but enjoyed New Zealand so much he became a permanent resident. [1] He became a Lecturer in the Department of Physics in 2014, Senior Lecturer in February 2017 and Associate Professor in February 2021. [2] He is a principal investigator at the Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies. [4]
Erkintalo studies laser light and how it interacts with matter, both fundamental physics and technological applications. He developed the theoretical model for microresonator frequency combs, which can convert a single laser beam into hundreds or thousands of different-coloured beams. [4] Currently fibre-optic communications systems use hundreds of lasers with different wavelengths to increase the amount of information transmitted; a microresonator frequency comb could allow a single beam to do this work, greatly improving performance and energy efficiency. [4] [5] His work on temporal cavity solitons has potential for the development of light-based computer memory. [6]
Erkintalo has also been part of the development of inexpensive ultrashort pulsed lasers with potential applications in microscopy and micro-machining. [5] These lasers have extremely short pulses of hundreds of femtoseconds, which have very high peak energy and can be used in environments where they would have to work under extreme noise, temperature, and vibration. [7]
Erkintalo was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2015 and two Marsden Fund grants. [8] He won the Hamilton Award, the Royal Society Te Apārangi's Early Career Research Excellence Award for Science, in 2016 for his work in nonlinear optics and laser physics. [1]
On 30 June 2020 Erkintalo was presented with the 2019 Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize for his contributions to new laser technologies. [6] [4] Most of the $200,000 prize will go towards exploring microresonator frequency comb architecture. [5] [3]
Nicolaas Bloembergen was a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy. During his career, he was a professor at Harvard University and later at the University of Arizona and at Leiden University in 1973.
Ti:sapphire lasers (also known as Ti:Al2O3 lasers, titanium-sapphire lasers, or Ti:sapphs) are tunable lasers which emit red and near-infrared light in the range from 650 to 1100 nanometers. These lasers are mainly used in scientific research because of their tunability and their ability to generate ultrashort pulses thanks to its broad light emission spectrum. Lasers based on Ti:sapphire were first constructed and invented in June 1982 by Peter Moulton at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Four-wave mixing (FWM) is an intermodulation phenomenon in nonlinear optics, whereby interactions between two or three wavelengths produce two or one new wavelengths. It is similar to the third-order intercept point in electrical systems. Four-wave mixing can be compared to the intermodulation distortion in standard electrical systems. It is a parametric nonlinear process, in that the energy of the incoming photons is conserved. FWM is a phase-sensitive process, in that the efficiency of the process is strongly affected by phase matching conditions.
An optical microcavity or microresonator is a structure formed by reflecting faces on the two sides of a spacer layer or optical medium, or by wrapping a waveguide in a circular fashion to form a ring. The former type is a standing wave cavity, and the latter is a traveling wave cavity. The name microcavity stems from the fact that it is often only a few micrometers thick, the spacer layer sometimes even in the nanometer range. As with common lasers, this forms an optical cavity or optical resonator, allowing a standing wave to form inside the spacer layer or a traveling wave that goes around in the ring.
Theodor Wolfgang Hänsch is a German physicist. He received one-third of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique", sharing the prize with John L. Hall and Roy J. Glauber.
A frequency comb or spectral comb is a spectrum made of discrete and regularly spaced spectral lines. In optics, a frequency comb can be generated by certain laser sources.
In numerical analysis, the split-step (Fourier) method is a pseudo-spectral numerical method used to solve nonlinear partial differential equations like the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. The name arises for two reasons. First, the method relies on computing the solution in small steps, and treating the linear and the nonlinear steps separately. Second, it is necessary to Fourier transform back and forth because the linear step is made in the frequency domain while the nonlinear step is made in the time domain.
Yuen-Ron Shen is a Taiwanese physicist. He is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work on non-linear optics. He was born in Shanghai and graduated from National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard under physicist and Nobel Laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen in 1963, and joined the department of physics at Berkeley in 1964. In the early years, Shen was probably best known for his work on self-focusing and filament propagation of laser beams in materials. These fundamental studies enabled the creation of ultrafast supercontinuum light sources. In the 1970s and 1980s, he collaborated with Yuan T. Lee on the study of multiphoton dissociation of molecular clusters. The molecular-beam photofragmentation translational spectroscopy that they developed has clarified much of the initial confusion concerning the dynamics of infrared multiphoton dissociation processes. In the 1980s and 1990s, Shen developed various nonlinear optics methods for the study of material surfaces and interfaces. Among these techniques, second-harmonic generation and sum frequency generation spectroscopy are best known and now widely used by scientists from various fields. He has collaborated with Gabor Somorjai on the use of the technique of Sum Frequency Generation Spectroscopy to study catalyst surfaces. He is the author of the book The Principles of Nonlinear Optics. Shen belongs to the prolific J. J. Thomson academic lineage tree. Currently, Shen works in U. C. Berkeley and Fudan University in Shanghai.
James Power Gordon was an American physicist known for his work in the fields of optics and quantum electronics. His contributions include the design, analysis and construction of the first maser in 1954 as a doctoral student at Columbia University under the supervision of C. H. Townes, development of the quantal equivalent of Shannon's information capacity formula in 1962, development of the theory for the diffusion of atoms in an optical trap in 1980, and the discovery of what is now known as the Gordon-Haus effect in soliton transmission, together with H. A. Haus in 1986. Gordon was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.
Luigi Lugiato is an Italian physicist and professor emeritus at University of Insubria (Varese/Como). He is best known for his work in theoretical nonlinear and quantum optics, and especially for the Lugiato–Lefever equation (LLE,). He has authored more than 340 scientific articles, and the textbook Nonlinear Dynamical Systems. His work has been theoretical but has stimulated a large number of important experiments in the world. It is also characterized by the fact of combining the classical and quantum aspects of optical systems.
Kerr frequency combs are optical frequency combs which are generated from a continuous wave pump laser by the Kerr nonlinearity. This coherent conversion of the pump laser to a frequency comb takes place inside an optical resonator which is typically of micrometer to millimeter in size and is therefore termed a microresonator. The coherent generation of the frequency comb from a continuous wave laser with the optical nonlinearity as a gain sets Kerr frequency combs apart from today's most common optical frequency combs. These frequency combs are generated by mode-locked lasers where the dominating gain stems from a conventional laser gain medium, which is pumped incoherently. Because Kerr frequency combs only rely on the nonlinear properties of the medium inside the microresonator and do not require a broadband laser gain medium, broad Kerr frequency combs can in principle be generated around any pump frequency.
The numerical models of lasers and the most of nonlinear optical systems stem from Maxwell–Bloch equations (MBE). This full set of Partial Differential Equations includes Maxwell equations for electromagnetic field and semiclassical equations of the two-level atoms. For this reason the simplified theoretical approaches were developed for numerical simulation of laser beams formation and their propagation since the early years of laser era. The Slowly varying envelope approximation of MBE follows from the standard nonlinear wave equation with nonlinear polarization as a source:
Andrew Marc Weiner OSA NAE NAI is an American electrical engineer, educator and researcher known for contributions to the fields of ultrafast optics and optical signal processing. He is the Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University.
The Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic and Quantum Technologies is a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence, established in 2015, hosted by the University of Otago, and composed of researchers in six New Zealand universities as well as partner institutions in the US, United Kingdom, and Singapore. It does fundamental research on the quantum nature of matter, the physics and optics of light, and the manipulation of individual photons. New knowledge and applications are commercialised for industries including agritech, medicine, and civil engineering.
Elisabeth Giacobino is a French physicist specialized in laser physics, nonlinear optics, quantum optics and super-fluidity. She is one of the pioneers of quantum optics and quantum information. She graduated from Pierre and Marie Curie University and started working at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where she has spent the majority of her professional career. She has been an invited professor at New York University and University of Auckland. She has over 230 publications and over 110 invited presentations in international conferences. She has been the coordinator of four European projects and is a member of Academia Leopoldina as well as a fellow member of the European Physical Society, the European Optical Society and the Optical Society of America.
Yanne Kouomou Chembo is an electrical engineer and associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research considers ultra-pure microwaves and Kerr frequency combs. He is a Fellow of The Optical Society and SPIE.
Harald Schwefel is a German-born physicist currently based in New Zealand. He is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Otago and a principal investigator in the Dodd-Walls Centre. His research focuses on the interaction of light and matter in dielectric materials, and his speciality is whispering gallery mode resonators (WGMRs), small disks of dielectric which confine and store laser light to facilitate nonlinear interactions. He uses these to generate optical frequency combs and to coherently convert between microwave and optical photons.
Nathalie Picqué is a French physicist working at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in the field Frequency Combs, where she studies ultra-high resolution spectroscopy using ultrashort pulses of light combined with Fourier-transform spectroscopy to reveal the fine chemistry of samples, in particular in the mid-infrared, demonstrating resolving power in excess of 1,000,000,000,000.
Pascal Del'Haye is a German physicist specializing in integrated photonics. He is heading the Microphotonics Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light.
Frédérique Vanholsbeeck is a New Zealand physicist, and is a full professor at the University of Auckland, specialising in optics and biophotonics, the physics of light.
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