Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a flurry of research activities in the emerging field of topological photonics, predominantly driven by the prospect for topological protection–a property that endows such systems with stability against local defects, disorders, and perturbations. Even though this field emerged in fermionic systems, using topological notions in optics has led to new paradigms in designing photonic platforms featuring unidirectional transport and robust edge modes. This in turn has opened new frontiers in laser design where an interplay between non-Hermicity, nonlinearity and topology exists. The peculiarities of non-Hermitian singularities in systems respecting parity-time symmetry (exceptional points) have also led to a host of counterintuitive phenomena. In this talk, I will present how these novel concepts in optics can introduce new regimes for light-matter interactions. Optical dynamics having no counterpart in conventional settings like faithful chiral state transfer in the vicinity of exceptional points will be presented. In addition a new class of topological lasers relying on the valley degree of freedom will be addressed. Along similar lines, I will discuss the possibility of using a class of versatile and multifaceted photonic emulator platforms in order to explore a series of novel phenomena that would have been otherwise challenging to study in other environments.
About the Speaker: Hadiseh Nasari received her PhD degree in 2017 in Electrical Engineering and with highest honors (summa cum laude) from K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. Between 2018 and 2020 she pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of California in San Diego and Berkeley. Subsequently she joined the University of Southern California (USC) where she is currently serving as a research associate and holds a joint position as a visiting research scientist at CREOL-The College of Optics & Photonics, at UCF. Her research interests include topological photonics, non-Hermitian physics, nonlinear optics, nanophotonics, 2D and van der Waals crystals, computational electromagnetics, and photonic emulators.
Dr. Nasari is the recipient of a Marie-Curie actions seal of excellence in 2019, of the 2018 Dr. Kazemi Ashtiani award from Iran’s National Elites’ Foundation (INEF) and of a special award of INEF from 2015 to 2018. She has translated “Fundamental of Photonics” by Prof. Saleh from English to Persian and serves as a regular reviewer for Optica.
Read More