Organizers
Nicolas Englebert, California Institute of Technology, USA
Miro Erkintalo, The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Stefano Trillo, Università degli studi di Ferrara, Italy
The terahertz (THz) regime hosts many current and future technological applications. It also corresponds to fundamentally important energy and time scales governing many transport phenomena comprising, for example, electron, lattice and spin dynamics in solids. Advances in THz science, thanks to the development of intense THz sources operating at high repetition rates and establishing highly-sensitive detection techniques, have enabled the emergence and growth of nonlinear THz photonics. Whereas nonlinear frequency conversion using IR and visible light is a common practice with efficiencies exceeding 10%, such efficiencies have not been attainable in the THz range until recently. The accomplished achievements in this field to date are expected to pave the way, for example, for new technologies operating at higher speeds and for the development of efficient and tunable mode-locked far-IR and THz lasers. Yet, extensive efforts are being made in order to: i) enhance and widely control the nonlinear THz-matter interactions and also reach higher-order nonlinearities, ii) tailor novel functionalities in solids, especially in the newly emerging quantum materials, iii) translate the field from being dependent on large-scale and sophisticated facilities to user-friendly integrated systems and iv) develop relevant technological applications.
Interestingly, dissipative temporal solitons (and corresponding optical frequency combs) can also be realized via second-order optical nonlinearities. Whilst such quadratic cavity solitons (QCSs) were theoretically predicted already in the 90s, they have been experimentally observed only recently, thanks to advances in the development of novel resonators, materials and nanofabrication. Given that second-order nonlinearities are intrinsically stronger than third-order nonlinearities, QCSs offer a promising route to overcome the efficiency limitations of Kerr cavity solitons, as well as pave the way for altogether new applications. In this symposium, we review the pioneering theoretical and experimental work on QCSs, share recent results and discuss the challenges and long-term view of this experimentally emerging field of research.
Invited Speakers
Majid Ebrahim-Zadeh, ICFO – Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, Spain
Broadband Frequency Comb Generation Based on X(2) cw Optical Parametric Oscillators
Marc Jankowski, Stanford University, USA
Title to be Announced
Marko Loncar, Harvard University, USA
Title to be Announced
Alireza Marandi, California Institute of Technology, USA
Dissipative Quadratic Solitons: Few-Cycle Frequency Combs in the Mid-IR
Mingming Nie, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Quadratic Cavity Solitons
Pedro Parra-Rivas, Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Italy
Dissipative Temporal Structures in Dispersive Quadratic Cavities: Origin, Bifurcation Structure and Stability
Harald Schwefel, University of Otago, New Zealand
Electro-optic Frequency Combs - Towards Visible Results
Stefan Wabnitz, Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Italy
Quadratic Optical Frequency Combs
Xiaoxiao Xue, Tsinghua University, China
Microresonator Frequency Combs Involving Both χ(2) and χ(3) Nonlinearities