Zhigang Chen

Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Phone: (415) 338 - 3876, Fax: (415) 338 - 2178
zchen@stars.sfsu.edu

Education & Experience:

Postdoc, Princeton University, 1995-98

Ph.D. Bryn Mawr College, 1995

M.S. University of Science and Technology of China, 1988

B.S. Yanzhou Normal University, 1985

Research Interest:

Lasers and Nonlinear Optics, Spatial Solitons and Waveguides, Photorefractive Materials, Pattern Formation and Spatiotemporal Chaos.

Currently, there are several projects carried on in our Optics Research Lab , including driven modulation instability of incoherent waves, dynamics of high-order optical vortices, soliton pixels and waveguide arrays, and nonlinear optical studies of photorefractive polymers.

Selected Publications:

M. Mitchell, Z. Chen, M. Shih and M. Segev, "Self-trapping of spatially incoherent light", Phys. Rev. Lett., 77, 490, 1996.

Z. Chen et al., "Self-trapping of an optical vortex by use of bulk photovoltaic effect", Phys. Rev. Lett. , 78, 2948, 1997.

Z. Chen et al., "Self-trapping of dark incoherent light beams", Science, 280, 889, 1998.
D.N. Christodoulides et al., "Theory of incoherent dark solitons", Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 5113, 1998.
T.H. Coskun et al., "Bright spatial solitons on an incoherent background beam", Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 2374, 2000.

Z. Chen et al., "Clustering in weakly-correlated wavefronts", the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA , 99, 5223, 2002.
Click here for a Publication List.

Teaching:

Phys 240: General Physics III

Phys 321: Modern Physics Lab

Phys 480: Modern Optics

Phys 715: Lasers & Quantum Optics

Take a look: Incoherent light forms guide and photonic lattices in our Optics Research Lab.