C. Conti
Ising machines are emerging as a powerful physical alternative to digital processors for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Among them, spatial photonic Ising machines (SPIMs) offer compact, room-temperature hardware with…
Rogue waves are intense and unexpected wavepackets ubiquitous in complex systems. In optics, they are promising as robust and noise-resistant beams for probing and manipulating the underlying material. Localizing large optical power is…
We study the Aharonov-Bohm caging effect in a one-dimensional lattice of theta-shaped units defining a chain of interconnected plaquettes, each one threaded by two synthetic flux lines. In the proposed system, light trapping results from…
Combinatorial optimization problems are crucial for widespread applications but remain difficult to solve on a large scale with conventional hardware. Novel optical platforms, known as coherent or photonic Ising machines, are attracting…
Quantum and classical physics can be used for mathematical computations that are hard to tackle by conventional electronics. Very recently, optical Ising machines have been demonstrated for computing the minima of spin Hamiltonians, paving…
Random media with tailored optical properties are attracting burgeoning interest for applications in imaging, biophysics, energy, nanomedicine, spectroscopy, cryptography and telecommunications. A key paradigm for devices based on this…
The new era of artificial intelligence demands large-scale ultrafast hardware for machine learning. Optical artificial neural networks process classical and quantum information at the speed of light, and are compatible with silicon…
We develop a novel theoretical framework describing polariton-enhanced spin-orbit interaction of light on the surface of two-dimensional media. Starting from the integral formulation of electromagnetic scattering, we exploit the reduced…
Pulsed Laser Deposition allows to obtain W and W-Ta alloy coatings with different nanostructures, monitored by X-ray diffraction. The correlation between such structures and the elastic properties is investigated for amorphous-like,…
Spin-glass theory is one of the leading paradigms of complex physics and describes condensed matter, neural networks and biological systems, ultracold atoms, random photonics, and many other research fields. According to this theory,…
Optical parametric oscillators are widely-used pulsed and continuous-wave tunable sources for innumerable applications, as in quantum technologies, imaging and biophysics. A key drawback is material dispersion imposing the phase-matching…
Light manifests extreme localized waves with long-tail statistics that seem analogous to the still little understood rogue waves in oceans, and optical setups promise to become laboratory test-beds for their investigation. However, to date…
We report on a novel kind of transition in random lasers induced by the geometrical confinement of the emitting material. Different dye doped paper devices with controlled geometry are fabricated by soft-lithography and show two…
We review experimental investigation on spatial shock waves formed by the self-defocusing action of a laser beam propagation in a disordered thermal nonlinear media.
We experimentally investigate the interplay between spatial shock waves and the degree of disorder during nonlinear optical propagation in a thermal defocusing medium. We characterize the way the shock point is affected by the amount of…
A disordered structure embedding an active gain material and able to lase is called random laser (RL). The RL spectrum may appear either like a set of sharp resonances or like a smooth line superimposed to the fluorescence. A recent letter…
We are able to detect the details of spatial optical collisionless wave-breaking through the high aperture imaging of a beam suffering shock in a fluorescent nonlinear nonlocal thermal medium. This allows us to directly measure how…
The random laser emission from the functionalized thienyl-S,S-dioxide quinquethiophene (T5OCx) in confined patterns with different shapes is demonstrated. Functional patterning of the light emitter organic material in well defined features…
By numerically integrating the three-dimensional Maxwell equations in the time domain with reference to a dispersive quadratically nonlinear material, we study second harmonic generation in planar photonic crystal microresonators. The…
We report on a statistical approach to mode-locking transitions of nano-structured laser cavities characterized by an enhanced density of states. We show that the equations for the interacting modes can be mapped onto a statistical model…