William Mong Distinguished Lecture
by Professor Andrew Weiner
Jul 15, 2016
Professor Andrew Weiner, Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, gave a lecture on July 15, 2016 titled “Signal Processing at Light Speed: Ultrashort Optical Pulse Generation with Arbitrary Waveforms”.
Lasers capable of generating picosecond and femtosecond pulses of light are now firmly established and are widely deployed. This talk discussed selected aspects of the field of programmable pulse shaping, in which ultrafast laser fields are manipulated to achieve nearly arbitrary waveforms, from its inception more than twenty-five years ago until the present. The lecture began with a brief introduction to ultrafast optics and then specifically addressed methods permitting shaping of ultrafast laser fields on time scales too fast for direct electronic control. Illustrative examples of applications, ranging from high speed optical signal transmission to new ultrafast science, were discussed. The final section of the lecture drew on recent work from the Weiner laboratory in which pulse shaping is applied for control of broadband wireless transmission, for shaping the individual spectral lines of frequency combs generated via nonlinear wave mixing in microresonators, and for manipulation of correlated photon wave packets in quantum optics.