In the last few years, optics has witnessed the emergence of two fields namely metasurfaces and parity-time (PT) symmetry. Optical metasurfaces are engineered structures that provide unique responses to electromagnetic waves, absent in natural materials. On the other hand, PT symmetry has emerged from quantum mechanics, when a new class of non-Hermitian Hamiltonian quantum systems was shown to have real eigenvalues. In this work, we demonstrate how PT-symmetric diffractive structures are capable of eliminating diffraction orders in specific directions, while maintaining/enhancing the remaining orders. In the second part of this work, we emphasize on supersymmetry (SUSY) and its applications in optics. Even though the full ramification of SUSY in high-energy physics is still a matter of debate that awaits experimental validation, supersymmetric techniques have already found their way into low-energy physics. In this work, we apply certain isospectral techniques in order to achieve single mode lasing in multi-element waveguide systems, where multimode chaotic emission is expected. In the third part of this dissertation, we emphasize on dynamically reconfigurable nanoparticle platforms. By exploiting the dielectrophoresis effect, we demonstrate how controllable lasing can be achieved in random photonic arrangements. Although this work focuses on the case of controlling random lasers, we expect that the proposed nanoparticle architecture can incorporate heterogeneous materials of a wide range of optical functionalities, including gain, scattering, plasmonic resonance, and nonlinearity. In the last part of the dissertation, we demonstrate the capability of synthesizing space-time (ST) wave packets, based on new propagation-invariant elementary solutions of the wave equation identified through a complexification of the spatial and temporal degrees of freedom. By establishing the connection between ST propagation-invariant pulses and tilted-pulse-front pulses, a path is opened to exploiting the unique attributes of such wave packets both in nonlinear and quantum optics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-7694 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| Creators | Nye, Nicholas |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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