Structured Photons – Their Application in Quantum Photonics
Electromagnetic waves, solutions to Maxwell’s equations, are “transverse” in vacuum. Namely, the waves’ oscillatory electric and magnetic fields are confined within a plane transverse to the waves’ propagation direction. Thus, the polarisation of these fields can be described by an arbitrary vectorial superposition of two vectors lying in the transverse plane. Though spatially uniform polarised beams are widely used in optics, spatially structured polarised beams have received much attention in the last decades. Such beams may possess well-defined polarisation topological structures in the transverse plane, which is isolated and preserved upon free-space propagation. Under tight-focusing conditions, the polarisation of these beams can exhibit three-dimensional structures, and may result in beams possessing longitudinal electric or magnetic field. Such structures can exhibit features such as transverse spin angular momentum; and non-trivial topologies such as Möbius or Ribbon strips.
In my talk, I will present the recent progress, challenges, and developments in structuring the polarisation of optical beams. The stability and the dynamics of two- and three-dimensional polarisation topologies, e.g. Möbius and Ribbon strips, as well as knots, will also be the subject of my presentation. Finally, I will present their applications in simulating complex quantum
systems and quantum communication.
Professor Ebrahim Karimi is a Canada Research Chair in Structured Light at the University of Ottawa, a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen-Germany and Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences (IASBS). Prof. Karimi received numerous awards, such as Ontario’s Early Research Award in 2018, Young Researcher of the year in Faculty of Science in 2018, and he is a Fellow of The Optical Society (OSA), a member of the Global Young Academy (GYA), a Fellow of the Max Planck Institute, and a Fellow of the NRC-uOttawa Joint Centre for Extreme Photonics (JCEP). He is also an Associate Editor of Optics Express, and New Journal of Physics, and a Guest Editor of Journal of Optics. Applications of structured quantum waves (massive and massless particles) in modern science are the main subject of his research team, the Structured Quantum Optics (SQO) .