Professor Costas Soukoulis once visited me in Australia and introduced me to the field of photonic crystals. Since 1993, I have worked at the Australian National University.
Soon, I extended my spatial soliton research into the context of discrete systems and optical lattices. But spatial solitons are simpler, so then I started to study them.
These are temporal solitons, and complicated effects (e.g., Raman scattering and high-order dispersion) need to be considered when a soliton becomes too short in duration. Snyder was working on spatial solitons and I already had a lot of knowledge of optical solitons in optical fibers. Later, I was invited by Allan Snyder who co-authored the famous book Optical Waveguide Theory. I left the Soviet Union first to Spain in 1989, and then moved from Spain to Germany as a Humboldt Fellow. I was very lucky to meet with many great people in my life and almost each of these meetings have influenced my decision on choosing a fresh research direction.Īfter receiving a PhD degree, I worked at the Institute for Low Temperature Physics for a couple of years. My switch to a different field seemed to be triggered by some lucky events. I roughly followed that path during my research career having what I call “four lives in science”-solitons, photonic crystals, metamaterials, and now nanophotonics. Yuri Kivshar: : My philosophy is that you should change your field of research every 8-10 years if you want to remain active in science. That is how optical fiber solitons came to play, and that is how I was attracted to soliton research under the context of nonlinear optics. After some discussions, we realized that our work on solitons might be useful for fiber optics, and we started to study specific properties of solitons described by the nonlinear equations in fibers. In 1989, I met a few people from Moscow who were working on optical fibers with Professor Evgeni Dianov at the Prokhorov Institute of General Physics. I had developed dissatisfaction in my research, as I wanted something more exciting. In general, it is very hard to make a link between what you’re doing with theory and what you measure in an experiment. In solid state physics, we have heating, noise, different types of multi-phonon excitations, and a lot of statistics, which make it impossible to generate any clear theory. In contrast, we have Maxwell’s equations in optics even its simplified form of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation works very well. Yuri Kivshar: : Solid state physics is a difficult field because it is not linked to simple equations. Besides providing exact solutions, the physics behind solitons involves self-induced energy localization and competition between dispersion (or diffraction) and nonlinearity. I was fascinated by the properties of solitons because they correspond to nice solutions of nonlinear partial differential equations and might appear in realistic experiments.
When I approached Professor Kosevich, he was working on the Frenkel–Kontorova model which is one of the simplest models of crystal dislocation, known to reduce to the sine-Gordon equation with soliton solutions. My PhD supervisor was academician Arnold Kosevich, who is the silent co-author of the seventh volume of Landau-Lifshitz Course of Theoretical Physics rumor says he helped to write a large part of the book Theory of Elasticity.Īt the beginning of the fourth year (or maybe even at the end of the third year) at the University, I got involved in research work. And theoretical physics looked more attractive because it combines both math and physics. I became interested in physics because physicists study real things. But I discovered that true mathematicians must prove theorems, and I did not like theorems.
I liked math, and even considered for some time being a mathematician. Yuri Kivshar: : I was born in the city of Kharkov and studied physics at the Kharkov National University where Soviet academician Lev Landau was Chair of the Department of Theoretical Physics.