Dr. Ryan Balili presented his papers “Lasing and Polariton Condensation” and “Semiconductor Microcavities as Optical Stress Sensors” during the Workshop on Singular Optics and Its Applications to Modern Physics at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy on May 30 to June 3, 2011.
Balili was invited as a speaker and a participant to the workshop that explores current frontiers of researches. These researches relate to singularities in optics and, in other contexts, where singularities are present in quantum fluids.
The workshop sessions, consisting mainly of discussions on the different aspects of singularities, expounded on the generation, manipulation, and applications of optical vortices including connections to vortices and vortex structures in other physical systems.
The workshops and lectures were directed by world-renowned physicists and scientists who are pioneers in the field of optical vortices such as Sir Michael Berry, Marat Soskind, and Miles Padgett, among others. Topics included subjects on how to create light with a twist, how to represent them using Laguerre-Gauss functions, and how to use it for quantum computing. Also discussed were the dynamics of quantum vortices in atomic condensates, polariton condensates, and superfluids. (jbm:rbb)
