Photonic Time-Crystals

Photonic Time Crystals (PTCs) are dielectric media whose refractive index is modulated periodically in time at time scales of an optical cycle. These systems conserve momentum but not energy, and are characterized by momentum bands and bandgaps, where the amplitudes of their eigenmodes can increase (or decrease) exponentially.  I will introduce the fundamentals of PTCs, discuss the topological features of waves propagating in PTCs, localization in PTCs containing disorder, and spatiotemporal photonic crystals. But more interesting than all the rest – I will discuss the classical and quantum features of light emission in PTCs from various radiation sources, such as free electrons, classical dipoles,  quantum fluctuations, and the emission by atoms. The latter opens new avenues for making widely tunable lasers that extract energy from the temporal modulation of the medium.

Biography:

Moti Segev is the Robert J. Shillman Distinguished Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, at the Technion, Israel. He received his BSc and PhD from the Technion in 1985 and 1990. After postdoc at Caltech, he joined Princeton as Assistant Professor (1994), becoming Associate Professor in 1997, and Professor in 1999. Subsequently, Moti went back to Israel, and in 2009 was appointed as Distinguished Professor.

Moti’s interests are mainly in photonics, solitons, lasers, and quantum optics. He won numerous international awards, among them the 2007 Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physics Society, the 2009 Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America, and the 2014 Arthur Schawlow Prize of the American Physical Society. In 2011, he was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences, in 2015 to the National Academy of Science (USA), and in 2021 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014 Moti Segev won the Israel Prize (highest honor in Israel) and in 2019 he has won the EMET Prize.

Above all his achievements, Moti takes pride in the success of his graduate students and postdocs, among them are currently 23 professors in the USA, Germany, Taiwan, Croatia, Italy, India, China and Israel, and many holding senior R&D positions in the industry.