Optical Precursors

Introduction.- Theory of optical precursors.- Searching for precursors: From microwave to primary optical experiments.- Observation of optical precursors in cold atoms.- Optical precursor of a single photon.- Discussion and outlook.

Professor Michael Loy earned both his BSc (1966) and PhD (1971) degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. He joined HKUST in 1993 as Professor of Physics and served as Dean of Science from 1998 to 2004. Before coming to HKUST, Professor Loy worked for more than 20 years at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in New York. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is also a member of the Optical Society of America. His main research interests include nonlinear optical propagation effects, two-photon coherent transients, nonlinear optical studies of surfaces, the state-selective studies of molecule-surface interactions. His recent work involves desorption of molecules from surfaces induced by femtosecond laser pulses.

Prof Shengwang Du joined HKUST's Department of Physics as an Assistant Professor in 2008. He obtained BS in Electrical Engineering from Nanjing University, MS in Physics from Peking University, MS in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He had been a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University before joining HKUST.

Prof. Jiefei Chen obtained her PhD in Physics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and is currently Professor in the Department of Physics at the East China Normal University. Her areas of interest are Atomic and Molecular Optics, Quantum optics, and Nonlinear Optics.

Dr. Heejeong Jeong is a Research Staff Member at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Yong-in, Korea. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Physics Dept. at Duke Univ., Durham, NC in 2006 for her study of the Optical Precursors using cold potassium atoms, under the supervision of Dr. Daniel J. Gauthier. She continued her research of Optical Precursors for two years at Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. In 2008, she joined Samsung Electronics (Suwon, Korea) and moved to SAIT to carry out research and