Press
release by the University cites this year's NSF CAREER awards by
three individual
physics faculty members.Only two other physics
departments in the U.S. received such a large number of
CAREER awards.
For the EXPO 2000 World Fair
in Germany, I created a presentation that has been made
part of a permanent exhibition maintained by the Max-Planck
Society: The
Science Tunnel
(look for section 3 on complex systems).
One of the projects I started as a postdoc made
it to the cover of the annual report of the MPI for Physics of Complex
Systems, and also into the "Optics in 2000" section of OPN,
see below.
In this "Optics in '97" special
issue of Optics & Photonics News, our work appeared on the
cover and in the "AfterImage" section. OPN selected our work
as one of the year's highlights in '97 and in '98 and in
2000.
What is an Asymmetric Resonant Cavity anyway ? ARCs are convex resonators whose fractional
deformation is so large that the wave equation cannot be solved satisfactorily
by perturbation techniques. Shown here as an example is a dielectric cylinder
with an oval cross section. Such resonators can be used in lasers or other
devices that rely on the existence of long-lived states. The calculated
intensity distribution of such a resonator mode is shown here as a false-color
image (top of the picture). The key to understanding the intrinsic emission properties of
these modes (e.g. their directional emission) is a one-to-one correspondence
between waves and rays (red arrow, bottom). The wave field is affected by
chaos in the ray dynamics.
Emission from the points of highest curvature is intuitively
expected, and the tangential orientation follows from Snell's law of refraction.
Due to phase space structure, the light here
originates slightly away from the high- curvature points, but still tangential
to the surface.
The cover
image (see blow) also appeared on Yale's printed graduate student
brochure.
Another of my plots, showing a mode of the "bowtie laser",
is used in the header of
