Prisoner Photons: Trapping light for fun (and profit?) (Presenting at AUPAC - Time/Date TBC)

Light tends to roam free in space, but we can play tricks to trap it. When we can trap photons in microscopic spaces, their interactions with matter change quantitatively and qualitatively and we can harness those changes to our advantage. For instance, we can use trapped light to make ultra-sensitive sensors, highly-efficient lasers and sources of quantum photons, and to optically control the mechanical vibrations of matter. The workhorse device for trapping light at such small scales is the optical micro-resonator. I will introduce the working principles of different optical micro-resonators, how they can be modeled, studied, and fabricated, as wellas some of the cool phenomena that have been demonstrated with them.

Pablo Bianucci did his undergraduate studies in Physics at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, finishing in 2001. He then moved to the University of Texas at Austin to do a PhD, which kept him busy until 2007. After that, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, McGill University, and Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. In 2012 he started as a professor at Concordia University's Department of Physics, where he is now an Associate Professor. His research involves optical micro-resonators of different types, both looking at their fundamental physics and at possible applications.