Amir Abdolvand

Biography

Amir Abdolvand's research merges together various concepts from atomic and molecular physics, and waveguide optics in order to obtain an exquisite control over light-matter interaction. Currently he is an assistant professor at the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Amir received both his BSc (Physics) and MSc (first class degree; Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics) from Shiraz-State-University (Iran) in 2002 and 2004, respectively. His MSc work was on the properties of non-equilibrium, spatially-extended dynamical systems, commonly known as “complex systems.” In 2005 and after finishing his graduate studies, he joined the Optics Group at the University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) to work on mid-IR ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy. He started his research in the field of fibre optics—Photonic Crystal Fibres (PCF)—in 2007 by joining the group of Prof. Philip Russell at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) in Erlangen as a PhD student where he developed expertise in the design and fabrication of various low-loss PCFs. From 2011 till 2016, and after receiving his PhD (summa cum laude) he led the Raman sub-group at MPL focused on the fabrication, development and applications of (gas-filled) hollow-core PCFs for studies in various areas of nonlinear optics, laser-matter interaction, and spectroscopy. Several highlights of his research include, the first experimental observation of self-similarity in stimulated Raman scattering and the demonstration of the world’s first fibre-based supercontinuum covering the spectral range from the vacuum ultraviolet to infrared. He has also been part of the team which demonstrated the world’s first fibre-based optical quantum memory in a Caesium-filled hollow-core PCF. Amir joined the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at NTU in 2017. He is the lead scientist for the design and fabrication of PCFs at the Centre for Optical Fibre Technology (COFT), NTU. He is also the group leader and the responsible person for the high-power laser facility LUCI—the Laboratory for Ultrafast and Coherent Interaction—at NTU, which he is currently developing.

Research Interest

Ability to “engineer” and “shape” the chemical and geometrical properties of glass as its main building block