Abstract
Lasers have been incredibly successful in their technological impact: providing us with fast global communications, vast optical data storage, precision manufacture, improved healthcare, and unique tools for fundamental research. The special properties of lasers – including high directionality and spectral purity – originate from the unique processes occurring when an optical amplifying medium is placed inside a cavity (‘the box’). One problem is that these properties can be seriously degraded due to beam distortions that occur in the amplifying medium, especially in high power lasers. In this lecture I show that nature provides some fascinating resources whereby laser light can self-correct for its own distortion – a process that has been referred to as ‘time-reversal’. One can even make lasers that self-organise and adapt to their environment. To enable the full capability of self-organisation one has to remove, or adapt, the fixed constraints imposed by ‘the box’ containing the laser. Some of the fundamental ingredients that are needed to make light self-organising include gain, nonlinearity and feedback. Optical systems with these properties can display adaptation, competition, survival-of-the-fittest and other behaviour more associated with biological eco-systems. Understanding of these adaptive principles, together with imaginative engineering of the ‘environment’, could lead the way to a new generation of laser and optical systems operating on entirely new self-organising and biologically-inspired principles.
Photo Gallery
Mike performing a ropy trick
Demonstrating science with an executive toy built by the group’s Optics workshop
Prof Donal Bradley, head of Physics, presents Mike with a songsheet
of “Wild Rover” just before Mike entertained his guests
Presented with a shark with a frickin’ laser beam in its head
Mike with Prof Henry Hutchinson, Director of Central Laser Facility,
Rutherford Appleton Lab, who performed the vote of thanks
Mike with wife Hebe and her parents at the post-inaugural celebrations
All photos taken by Meilin Sancho