1. CHARLAS EN EL ITM – AÑO INTERNACIONAL DE LA LUZ, 7 y 8 DE ABRIL 2015.
PROFESOR INVITADO MAXIME JACQUOT. DEPARTAMENTO DE ÓPTICA DEL
INSTITUTO FEMTO-ST, BESANCON – FRANCIA.
1. Conferencia divulgativa (Lugar: Auditorio menor ITM Fraternidad - Calle 54 A # 30 – 01,
Barrio Boston-Medellín. Fecha: martes 7 de Abril 2015 de 16:00 a 18:00):
"Shaping the light : to measure in 3D, a nano-machining tool or an ultra-fast
information processing tool."
"In proclaiming an International Year focusing on the topic of light science and its
applications, the UN has recognized the importance of raising global awareness
about how light-based technologies promote sustainable development and provide
solutions to global challenges in energy, education, agriculture and health. Light
plays a vital role in our daily lives and is an imperative cross-cutting discipline of
science in the 21st century. It has revolutionized medicine, opened up international
communication via the Internet, and continues to be central to linking cultural,
economic and political aspects of the global society."* from light2015.org.
We can receive today ‘light’ that has been traveling for over 13 billion years, around
300,000 years after the Big Bang. Light was at the origin of the universe. Many
Philosophers studied light and vision in science in order to understand the world
where they lived. Nowadays, science and technology are combined in order to play
with light in many applications. Laser sources can be considered as the most
important discovery of the twenty century. We need also to control light when it
propagates, to guide it, and we need to shape it to obtain magnified or reduced
images from very far objects or micro-objects, invisible for naked eyes. Because light
is an electromagnetic wave, we can modulate it by tuning different parameters like
intensity, phase, frequency or polarisation. By this way, we can recover full 3D object
informations by recording light field it emitted with a very high resolution. Light can
also interact with matter. When ultra short laser pulses are shaped, laser nano-
machining can be performed with complex structured beams. Within optical fibers,
light is guided and can bring informations. But light is also shaped in time in order to
process the information. Recent works show that experiments based on brain-
inspired computational paradigm allows ultra-fast information processing by using
photonics systems built with telecom devices.
2. Conferencia especializada (Lugar: Auditorio Parque i - ITM Fraternidad - Calle 54 A # 30 –
01, Barrio Boston-Medellín. Fecha: miércoles 8 de Abril 2015 de 9:00 a.m a 11:00 a.m):
Research in Optics Department at FEMTO-ST institute, OPTO research group.
Focus on:
- Part 1: Delay dynamics with photonic systems: application to optical chaos
communication, micro-wave oscillator and photonic Reservoir Computing.
- Part 2: Dynamical optics with Spatial Light Modulators for nondiffracting laser beams,
micro-nanomachinig and nanometrology.

2. The research topics of the OPTO group are structured around two main axes (i)
Optoelectronics and Systems and (ii) Ultrafast Photonics. These activities have a
multidisciplinary nature, involving issues of electronics, photonics, nonlinear
dynamics, ultrafast optics and fundamental aspects of light-matter interactions.
My research interests currently include delayed nonlinear dynamics and its
applications in optical chaos communications and photonic Reservoir
Computing. A second axe of research concerns non-diffracting and accelerated
femtosecond laser beams for surface micro- or nano-processing.
In 2006, I joined Pr. L. Larger and started research on nonlinear dynamics. It is
developed in the particular framework of advanced photonic applications
involving the many different dynamical behavior performed by nonlinear delay
optoelectronic feedback loop systems. These behavior span from high
complexity chaotic motions (typ. used for chaotic optical encryption), to complex
transients excited from a stable steady state (photonic computing via Reservoir
Computing principles), through high regularity limit cyles (e.g. for pure tone
radar microwave sources).
In June 2009, we conducted the first tests of chaos cryptography at 10 Gb/s in
the fibered network “Lumière” of the city of Besancon (40 km telecom network
access), and also in Athens on a network of metropolitan Telecom over 100 km
with a record speed of 10 Gb/s.
Since 2010, we work on another application of delay dynamical systems, and we
focused on ultrafast information processing based on brain-inspirerd
computational concepts, Reservoir Computing. We design and implement a
photonics realization of a Reservoir Computing (RC) unit, with the potential for
versatile and fast signal handling. We achieved high computational performance
with only a small number of photonics components, using dynamical systems
with time delay to realize the required high dimensionality for the RC. This
ambitious aim was motivated by the fact that optical information processing
remains to be a major challenge in nowadays and future photonics networks.
We obtained the experimental demonstration of a hybrid optoelectronic
neuromorphic computer based on a complex nonlinear phase dynamics.
As part of another research topic in our group: dynamical optics with Spatial
Light Modulator (SLM) for material micro & nano-processing by non-diffracting
or accelerated femtosecond laser beams. We realize a 2D spatial modulation of
light by applying a computed phase mask with a SLM. Phase mask can be
obtained by computed generated holograms (CGH), with a phase-only
modulation technique. We demonstrate compatibility with applications by
generating these tailored beams using ultra short laser pulses at micrometer
scale. A central element is based on the filamentation regime of femtosecond
non-diffracting beams. Exciting results demonstrate that non-diffracting beams
allow the generation of plasma channels with unprecedented stability, length
and superior control of plasma generation in space that produces long-range
plasma channels with constant electronic density. Recent results obtained in our
group at micro- and nano-meter scale have shown a breakthrough application of
intense femtosecond non-diffracting beams to laser materials micro/nano-

3. processing. This approach enabled us to obtain, in the single shot regime, the
realization of nano-channels (200-800 nm diameter) with unprecedented high
aspect ratio (up to 100) and length/diameter control.
Accelerating beams are a class of laser beam that consist of a strongly localized
high intensity lobe that follows a curved trajectory. Since their discovery in 2007
(Siviloglou et al), they have been applied to particle sorting and nonlinear optics.
We have developed an approach based on identifying accelerating beams as a
specific case of caustics to generate arbitrary accelerating beams, even in the
nonparaxial regime. A very novel application of ultraintense nonparaxial
femtosecond accelerating beams to laser processing has been recently reported
in our group.