Kenneth L. Schepler
High-finesse planar Fabry-P{\'e}rot (FP) cavities spectrally filter the incident field at discrete resonances, and thus cannot be utilized to resonantly enhance the field of ultrashort pulses. Introducing judicious angular dispersion into a…
Angular dispersion (AD) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in optics after light traverses a diffractive or dispersive device, whereby each wavelength propagates at a different angle. AD is useful in a variety of applications; for example,…
Space-time (ST) wave packets are propagation-invariant pulsed optical beams that travel freely in dielectrics at a tunable group velocity without diffraction or dispersion. Because ST wave packets maintain these characteristics even when…
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are surface-bound waves at metal-dielectric interfaces that exhibit strong out-of-plane field confinement, a key feature for applications is nano-scale sensing and imaging. However, this advantage is offset…
Because surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are surface waves characterized by one free transverse dimension, the only monochromatic diffraction-free spatial profiles for SPPs are cosine and Airy waves. Pulsed SPP wave packets have been…
In addition to longitudinal spin angular momentum (SAM) along the axis of propagation of light, spatially structured electromagnetic fields such as evanescent waves and focused beams have recently been found to possess transverse SAM in the…
When an optical pulse is focused into a multimode waveguide or fiber, the energy is divided among the available guided modes. Consequently, the initially localized intensity spreads transversely, the spatial profile undergoes rapid…
When an optical pulse is spatially localized in a highly multimoded waveguide, its energy is typically distributed among a multiplicity of modes, thus giving rise to a speckled transverse spatial profile that undergoes erratic changes with…
"Space-time" (ST) wave packets constitute a broad class of pulsed optical fields that are rigidly transported in linear media without diffraction or dispersion, and are therefore propagation-invariant in absence of optical nonlinearities or…
Light can be confined transversely and delivered axially in a waveguide. However, waveguides are lossy static structures whose modal characteristics are fundamentally determined by the boundary conditions, and thus cannot be readily changed…
We introduce the unique class of propagation-invariant surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) representing pulsed surface wave packets propagating along unpatterned metal-dielectric interfaces and are localized in all dimensions - with…