The Semiclassical Geometry of Caustic Structured Light

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• Kerr Maxwell, University of Birmingham
• Thursday 12 October 2023, 13:15-14:30
• Theory Library.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Hannah Price.

Structured Gaussian modes, special function solutions to the paraxial wave equation with a Gaussian envelope, are a central tool of modern optical theory and experiment. Despite having a prescribed structure with an abundance of identities to aid computation, efficiently propagating these structured light modes is a hard analytical and numerical problem. In this talk I will discuss a ray-optical approach to constructing semiclassical approximations of these modes by quantizing the space of rays, enabling efficient calculation with Gaussian beamlets and in doing so expose all manner of wonderful geometry underlying the symmetry and quantization of the problem. I will also show how this structure suggests new natural approaches to mode design in “real” and “operator” space.

This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Seminars series.

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• Bham Talks
• Theoretical Physics Seminars
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