Sukow's Photon Emporium:
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos
in Electronic and Laser Systems
My main research interest is the nonlinear dynamics of semiconductor lasers, a wonderfully rich subdiscipline full of good problems to be investigated (look further down this page for a more lengthy introduction to this topic). I am an experimentalist, and my lab is in Howe 212. All the good toys are there.
I am eager to share this research with student collaborators, so if you're a current or prospective W&L undergraduate interested in getting involved in this sort of endeavor, please contact me. This lab offers opportunities for student involvement at all levels. Research experience as an undergraduate is fun and will teach you a lot, both about physics and about doing physics. It is also among the most valuable additions to your resume; research means critical thinking, attention to detail, creativity, and persistence, qualities looked upon very favorably by employers and graduate schools.
The pages below will tell you more about who we are and what we've been up to in Howe 212 (we've been as busy as bees). If you'd like to look into my previous work on this subject in greater depth, some of my publications are available in .pdf form from my online CV.
Semiconductor lasers (also called diode lasers) are everywhere these days; they're the lasers that run your CD player, your videodisk player, your fiberoptic telecommunications, and so on. As you might imagine, all these technological applications work best when the laser is behaving itself. Unfortunately, these diode lasers also have a nasty predisposition for going unstable. They are especially sensitive to stray light, which is unavoidable in many real situations; it may arise from a reflection of the laser beam off of your compact disc, for example. Then instead of a nice, steady beam of light coming out, the laser may start to oscillate and pulse erratically. This is bad, at least from a technological point of view.
However, it's also incredibly interesting, complex, and beautiful in an abstract way. So we study those weird, erratic behaviors, within the framework of nonlinear dynamics and chaos. Part of the goal is simply understanding the complex behaviors, their origins and characteristics. Some current questions along this line involve the roles of spontaneous emission noise, multimode operation of the laser, and the persistence of memory in the system (the system has a sort of "memory" due to the delay time created while the light leaves the laser, reflects off of something, and is reinjected back into the laser. This delay also makes the system mathematically infinite-dimensional, but that's a story for another day). Another part of these studies is to control, suppress, or even exploit these chaotic dynamics. This is the subfield of nonlinear dynamics called control and synchronization of chaos.
Short descriptions of specific research projects we've worked on can be found on the Projects page.
Related topics are the dynamics of diode lasers with other types of feedback, studies of other types of lasers (fiber lasers, in particular), and the development of electrical circuit analogs for these systems which allow for investigation of these dynamics in a vastly more tractable experimental system. Since nonlinear dynamics is a highly cross-disciplinary field, however, the principles of these studies have surprising relationships to topics in biophysics, medicine, ecology, astronomy, economics, and music!
