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Professor Philip St.J. Russell, FRS

Director of the Russell Division – Photonic Crystal Fibres

Professor Philip Russell is a founding Director of the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL), which began operations in January 2009. Since 2005 he has also held the Krupp Chair in Experimental Physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He obtained his D.Phil. degree in 1979 at the University of Oxford, spending three years as a Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. In 1982 and 1983 he was a Humboldt Fellow at the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg (Germany), and from 1984 to 1986 he worked at the University of Nice (France) and the IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. From 1986 to 1996 he was based mainly at the University of Southampton, first of all in the Optical Fibre Group and then in the Optoelectronics Research Centre. From 1996 to 2005 he was professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Bath, where he established the Centre for Photonics and Photonic Materials. His research interests currently focus on scientific applications of photonic crystal fibres and related structures. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and The Optical Society (OSA) and has won several international awards for his research including the 2000 OSA Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize, the 2005 Thomas Young Prize of the Institute for Physics (UK), the 2005 Körber Prize for European Science, the 2013 EPS Prize for Research into the Science of Light, the 2014 Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis and the 2015 IEEE Photonics Award. He was OSA's President in 2015, the International Year of Light.

2023

Protecting Quantum Modes in Optical Fibers

Muhammad Abdullah Butt, Paul Roth, Gordon Wong, Michael Frosz, Luis Sanchez-Soto, E. A. Anashkina, A. V. Andrianov, Peter Banzer, Philip Russell, et al.

Physical Review Applied 19 054080 (2023) | Journal | PDF

Polarization-preserving fibers maintain the two polarization states of an orthogonal basis. Quantum communication, however, requires sending at least two nonorthogonal states and these cannot both be preserved. We present an alternative scheme that allows for using polarization encoding in a fiber not only in the discrete, but also in the continuous-variable regime. For the example of a helically twisted photonic crystal fiber, we experimentally demonstrate that using appropriate nonorthogonal modes, the polarization-preserving fiber does not fully scramble these modes over the full Poincaré sphere, but that the output polarization will stay on a great circle; that is, within a one-dimensional protected subspace, which can be parametrized by a single variable. This allows for more efficient measurements of quantum excitations in nonorthogonal modes.

Modulational instability and spectral broadening of vortex modes in chiral photonic crystal fibers

Paul Roth, Philip Russell, Michael Frosz, Yang Chen, Gordon Wong

Journal of Lightwave Technology 41 (7) 2061-2069 (2023) | Journal

We report on intra- and inter-modal four-wave-mixing (FWM) in N-fold rotationally symmetric (C_N) single- and multi-core chiral photonic crystal fiber (PCF), created by spinning the preform during fiber drawing. The non-circular modal field is forced to rotate as it propagates along the fiber, resulting in circular birefringence and robust maintenance of circular polarization state. Multi-core chiral C_N PCF supports vortex-carrying helical Bloch modes (HBMs) in which the degeneracy between clockwise and counter-clockwise vortices is lifted. This makes possible new kinds of intermodal polarization modulational instability (PMI). We develop PMI theory for vortex HBMs, and illustrate the results by a series of experiments in which two or more PMI sidebands with different vorticities and polarization states are selectively generated by adjusting the polarization state and topological charge of the pump light. In every case both the topological charge and the spin of the pump light are conserved. We also report generation of a broadband supercontinuum in a single circularly polarized vortex mode.

Compact Yb fiber few-cycle pulse source based on precision pulse compression and shaping with an adaptive fiber Bragg grating

Jacob Lampen, Francesco Tani, Peng Li, Kevin F. Lee, Jie Jiang, Philip Russell, Martin E. Fermann

Optics Express 31 8393-8399 (2023) | Journal | PDF

We generate bandwidth limited 10 µJ pulses of 92 fs pulse width using an adaptive fiber Bragg grating stretcher (FBG) in conjunction with a Lyot filter. The temperature controlled FBG is used to optimize the group delay, whereas the Lyot filter counteracts gain narrowing in the amplifier chain. Soliton compression in a hollow core fiber (HCF) allows for access to the few-cycle pulse regime. Adaptive control further enables the generation of nontrivial pulse shapes.

Selective phase filtering of charged beams with laser-driven antiresonant hollow-core fibers

Luca Genovese, Max Kellermeier, Frank Mayet, Klaus Floettmann, Gordon Wong, Michael Frosz, Ralph Assmann, Philip Russell, Francois Lemery

Physical Review Research 5 (1) 013096 (2023) | Journal | PDF

Emerging accelerator concepts increasingly rely on the combination of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation with electron beams, enabling longitudinal phase space manipulation which supports a variety of advanced applications. The handshake between electron beams and radiation is conventionally provided by magnetic undulators which unfortunately require a balance between the electron beam energy, undulator parameters, and laser wavelength. Here we propose a scheme using laser-driven large-core antiresonant optical fibers to manipulate electron beams. We explore two general cases using TM01 and HE11 modes. In the former, we show that large energy modulations O(100 keV). can be achieved while maintaining the overall electron beam quality. Further, we show that by using larger field strengths O(100 MV/m) the resulting transverse forces can be exploited with beam-matching conditions to filter arbitrary phases from the modulated electron bunch, leading to the production of ≈100 attosecond FWHM microbunches. Finally, we also investigate the application of the transverse dipole HE11 mode and find it suitable for supporting time-resolved electron beam measurements with sub-attosecond resolution. We expect the findings to be widely appealing to high-charge pump-probe experiments, metrology, and accelerator science.

Optical Vortex Brillouin Laser

Xinglin Zeng, Philip Russell, Yang Chen, Zheqi Wang, Gordon Wong, Paul Roth, Michael Frosz, Birgit Stiller

Laser & Photonics Reviews 17 2200277 (2023) | Journal | PDF

Optical vortices, which have been extensively studied over the last decades, offer an additional degree of freedom useful in many applications, such as optical tweezers and quantum control. Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), providing a narrow linewidth and a strong nonlinear response, has been used to realize quasi-continuous wave lasers. Here, stable oscillation of optical vortices and acoustic modes in a Brillouin laser based on chiral photonic crystal fiber (PCF) is reported, which robustly supports helical Bloch modes (HBMs) that carry circularly polarized optical vortex and display circular birefringence. A narrow-linewidth Brillouin fiber laser that stably emits 1st- and 2nd-order vortex-carrying HBMs is implemented. Angular momentum conservation selection rules dictate that pump and backward Brillouin signals have opposite topological charge and spin. Additionally, it is shown that when the chiral PCF is placed within a laser ring cavity, the linewidth-narrowing associated with lasing permits the peak of the Brillouin gain that corresponds to acoustic mode to be measured with resolution of 10 kHz and accuracy of 520 kHz. The results pave the way to a new generation of vortex-carrying SBS systems with applications in optical tweezers, quantum information processing, and vortex-carrying nonreciprocal systems.

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