CAP Lecture with Pablo Bianucci: Tightly Squeezing Light in Small Spaces

PSYU and the Department of Physics and Astronomy have the pleasure to welcome Pablo Bianucci from Concordia University. Dr Bianucci will be delivering a lecture during the colloquium hour in PSE 317 at 2.30PM on Tuesday, February 24th. Everyone is welcome to join, and there will be light refreshments served. --- Tightly Squeezing Light in Small Spaces Can we make lasers faster and more efficient? Can we explore the interaction between quantum mechanical matter and light? Can we detect the presence of a single virus in a drop of water? Can we play with the propagation speed of light pulses? It turns out that we can do that, and much more, by trapping light very tightly. Thanks to advances in fabrication technology it is now routinely possible to make structures that can keep light confined in microscopic spaces. When this happens, the interactions of light with matter can change in both quantitative and qualitative ways and we can harness these changes to our advantage. The workhorse device for trapping light at such small scales is the optical micro-resonator. I will introduce the working principles of different optical micro-resonators, and some of the cool phenomena that have been demonstrated with them. Among others, I will talk about the detection of minute amounts of substances, microscopic lasers, and simultaneously advancing and retarding a pulse of light. Short bio Pablo Bianucci did his undergraduate studies in Physics at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, finishing in 2001. He then moved to the University of Texas at Austin to do a PhD, which kept him busy until 2007. After that, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, McGill University, and Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, until 2012 when he started as an Assistant Professor at Concordia University's Department of Physics.