ANU Optica and SPIE Student Chapter Seminar

Solitons are generally thought to be pulses that propagate without changing shape even when affected by nonlinear and dispersive effects. They are a generic phenomenon and occur in water, planetary atmospheres, plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, and in optics. However, the description above is a simplification in that other phenomena, beyond the dominant nonlinear and dispersive effects, are neglected. One such phenomenon is mode coupling, which occurs when a soliton resonates with a linear wave, as occurs, for example, for the Morning Glory cloud formation that predominantly occurs over the Gulf of Carpentaria. The mathematical analysis to describe this coupling is challenging and was completed only relatively recently, even though its roots date back to the mid-19th century work of G. G. Stokes. This analysis reveals that the phenomenon is universal, not depending on the details of the wave. Despite its broad significance, these predictions were never tested in the lab. Using a fibre laser, we confirm the universality of the coupling and that it approximately obeys a universal scaling law. In this way our results serve to close a chapter in the study of perturbed nonlinear waves.

Martijn de Sterke received a master’s degree in applied physics from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and a PhD in Optics from the University of Rochester in 1987. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto, he joined in 1991 the University of Sydney, where he is now a professor in Physics. His research interests include nonlinear optics, near-field optics, passive cooling and laser-propelled light sails. During 2007-2012 he was the Editor-in-Chief of Optics Express.