Harnessing disorder for photonic applications (Conference Presentation)

For device applications, structural disorder and optical scattering have long been considered annoying and detrimental features that were best avoided or minimized. In this talk, I will show that disorder and complexity can be harnessed for photonic applications, in particular, to provide unique functionalities of photonic devices. We recently developed an on-chip random spectrometer that combines high resolution with small footprint. In addition, we incorporated disorder to a laser to reduce the spatial coherence for free-speckle full-field imaging, and to disrupt coherent nonlinear coupling of lasing modes to suppress temporal instabilities.