Molding the flow of waves in complex media: imaging, trapping, and shaping

Arthur Goetschy

ESPCI Paris

Molding the flow of waves in complex media: imaging, trapping, and shaping

The study of waves in complex systems has evolved profoundly over the last decade, with the demonstration of rich and useful effects that cannot be explained by the traditional diffusion model of wave propagation. In photonic systems in particular, recent developments in disorder engineering and wavefront shaping protocols have enabled spectacular demonstrations of light manipulation, such as tunable transparency, focusing or enhanced energy delivery in opaque materials. In this talk, we propose to review some of our recent achievements in this field. Concrete examples will include imaging through disordered systems, study of correlated materials with bandgap and localization properties, optimization of dwell-time, and transport of entangled photons in multiple-scattering systems.

About Speaker

Arthur Goetschy is an Associate Professor and theoretical physicist at ESPCI Paris. His research activities focus on the control of waves in complex media, light-matter interactions, and quantum optics. He developed during his PhD a framework to characterize the collective excitations of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, with applications for random lasers, photonic glasses, or cold atom gases. In 2012, he joined the group of Doug Stone at Yale University, where he established a random matrix formalism for the open channels of scattering systems, which has been successfully applied to enhance focusing, energy deposition, or absorption in wavefront-shaping experiments. Since his hiring in 2014 at Institut Langevin, he has proposed original models to harness dwell-time, synchronization, information, bandgaps, or localization in random or strongly correlated photonic structures, using classical or quantum entangled light.