Principal Investigator

T J Alexander Optical Sciences Centre, RSPhysSE, ANU

Project Title

Multicomponent Bose-Einstein Condensates in Optical Lattices

Brief Description for General Publications

The recent strong interest in photonic crystals is due to their remarkable ability to guide and control light. This ability combined with the effects of nonlinearity results in many new phenomena, such as the so-called `gap solitons'. If in addition the effects of energy flow are considered in the material then stationary states of light such as discrete vortices may also exist. These are general phenomena, occuring not just in nonlinear light propagation in photonic crystals but in any nonlinear wave propagation in the presence of a periodic potential. As such, understanding the behaviour of the fundamental states in periodic systems, such as discrete vortices, has a broad application to many fields - from nonlinear optics to Bose-Einstein condensation.