OSE Seminar by Dr. Frank Wise on Exploiting Extreme Nonlinear Waves in Femtosecond Fiber Lasers
Departmental News
Posted: October 20, 2025
Date: Thursday, October 23, 2025
Time: 12:30 PM to 1:45 PM
Location: PAIS, Room 2540 and Zoom
Speaker:Dr. Frank Wise
School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University
Abstract:
Short-pulse fiber lasers are attractive owing to the practical benefits of a waveguide medium. However, light pulses experience strong nonlinear effects in optical fiber, and these destabilize pulses of even modest energies. As a result, fiber lasers have lagged behind solid-state lasers in performance. Recent work has identified new solutions for pulse propagation in fiber that are stable despite accumulating huge nonlinear phase shifts, along with oscillator designs that leverage the highly-nonlinear propagation. These devices have almost nothing in common with conventional short-pulse lasers. Simple fiber oscillators that generate pulses with megawatt peak powers are now possible, and prospects for future increases in performance will be discussed. The talk will begin with a tutorial introduction to nonlinear pulse propagation in optical fiber.
Biography:
Frank Wise received a BS in Engineering Physics from Princeton University, an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in Applied Physics from Cornell University. Before PhD studies, he worked on integrated-circuit fabrication at Bell Laboratories. Since receiving the PhD in 1988, he has been on the faculty in Applied Physics at Cornell. From 2007 to 2011 he was the Director of the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, and from 2017 to 2024 he was the Director of the Cornell Center for Materials Research.
