The New Multimode Optics – Understanding and Exploiting Controllable Complexity

Technologies like silicon photonics allow complex optics. Emerging applications in communications, sensing, and classical and quantum information processing demand complex controllable circuits. Recent advances in novel interferometric mesh architectures, new algorithmic approaches to control, including self-configuring and self-stabilizing circuits, and a clarified modal mathematical approach, promise sophisticated and highly functional circuits beyond previous optics. This invited tutorial, given at the Frontiers in Optics conference, introduces and explains these ideas and how to work with them.

Invited Tutorial, Frontiers in Optics 21 (FiO 21), 4 November, 2021 (virtual conference) Paper FTh6C.1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.12174.89923