Final Report Summary - NMNP (Nonlinear Micro- and Nano-Photonics: nonlinear optics at the micrometer scale and below)
During the past 6 years of our ERC-supported program, the Segev group at the Technion has made several important breakthroughs that had a major impact on the entire field of optics. Some of these discoveries are now considered milestone contributions that have opened new fields. For example, the observation of the first photonic topological insulator (appeared in Nature, April 2013). This paper has marked the launch of a new field: topological photonics. Another milestone contribution was the discovery of self-accelerating wavepackets of Maxwell’s equations (Kaminer et al., PRL 2012). The concept of self-accelerating wavepackets was proposed by Michael Berry in 1979 in the context of quantum mechanics, and then introduced into optics and first demonstrated in any physical system by Demetri Christodoulides in 2007. It had a major impact in many directions. However, until our 2012 work that concept was believed to exist strictly within the realm of Schroedinger-like equations, whose optics analogue is the paraxial wave equation. For electromagnetic waves, as well as for many other kinds of waves, the paraxial equation is an approximation that holds when the features vary slowly on the wavelength scale. On finer scales, it was believed that shape-preserving accelerating beams do not exist. Our 2012 paper changed all of that: we have found shape-preserving accelerating solutions of Maxwell’s equations, which in their scalar form apply to a huge variety of waves systems in nature (e.g. acoustic waves in fluids, plasmonics, waves on membranes, etc.). Another important work was the experimental discovery of hyper-transport: wavepackets exhibiting expansion faster than ballistic expansion – by virtue of a disordered potential that also is fluctuating in time (Levi et al., Nature Physics 2012). Last but not least, as part of this program we have developed a new methodology for sub-wavelength (nanometric) imaging, that is now considered a breakthrough that can have a major impact on microscopy.