Heavy-flavour jet production and charm fragmentation with ALICE at LHC

Heavy quarks, produced in hard parton scatterings in the early stage of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions, are ideal probes to investigate the properties of the Quark--Gluon Plasma (QGP) produced in such collisions. Measurements of heavy-flavour jets can provide constraints on energy-loss models. In particular, they add information on how the radiated energy is dissipated in the medium. Studies of angular correlations between heavy-flavour and charged particles allow us to characterize the heavy-quark fragmentation process and its possible modification in a hot nuclear matter environment. This manuscript will focus on the latest results on heavy-flavour jets and D-meson correlations with charged particles studied with the ALICE detector in pp, p--Pb and Pb--Pb collisions.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures, Proceedings for Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM 2019

Optical Darboux Transformer

The Optical Darboux Transformer is introduced as a photonic device which performs the Darboux transformation directly in the optical domain. This enables two major advances for signal processing based on the nonlinear Fourier transform: (i) the multiplexing of different solitonic waveforms corresponding to arbitrary number of discrete eigenvalues of the Zakharov-Shabat system in the optical domain, and (ii) the selective filtering of an arbitrary number of individual solitons too. The Optical Darboux Transformer can be built using existing commercially available photonic technology components and constitutes a universal tool for signal processing, optical communications, optical rogue waves generation, and waveform shaping and control in the nonlinear Fourier domain

Instabilities, pattern formation, localized solutions, mode-locking and stochastic effects in nonlinear optical systems and beyond

In this thesis the results of scientific research about dierent nonlinear phenomena with particular emphasis to photonic systems are presented. Works about dissipation induced modulation instabilities with applications for signal amplification in nonlinear optics and mode-locking in lasers constitute the main part of the thesis. The dissipa-tive instabilities studied are of two kinds, parametric instabilities induced by a periodic variation of spectral losses and instabilities induced by non varying but spectrally asym-metric losses. Although the main achievements are theoretical successful collaboration with experimentalists are reported too. Other results presented in this thesis concern a new fundamental theory of active mode-locking in lasers having a more general validity than Haus’ one and hence useful for describing mode-locked lasers with a fast gain dynamics such as semiconductor or quantum cascade lasers; the prediction of the novel theoretical model have been successfully compared with experimental findings. Theo-retical studies are also presented about collective phenomena, such as synchronization and localization, in coupled excitable lasers with saturable absorber and localized so-lutions on the non-vanishing background of the two-dimensional nonlinear Schr¨odinger equation with periodic potential: the Bogoliubov-de Gennes bullets

All-optical pulse bursts generation from a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror

A novel method for the generation of bursts of optical pulses is proposed. It is shown analytically that a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror in single pass configuration can transform a low power input pulse into a burst consisting of pulses with individual energy up to tens of nJ. The burst features; number of pulses; and their peak power, energy, and duration can be tuned and controlled. Numerical simulations show robustness of the technique to presence of Raman scattering and that sub-picosecond pulse duration can be achieved. The latter highlights the relevance of the proposed pulse bursts generator for material processing and in medical applications involving optical ablation

Experimental Demonstration of Dual Polarization Nonlinear Frequency Division Multiplexed Optical Transmission System

Multi-eigenvalues transmission with information encoded simultaneously in both orthogonal polarizations is experimentally demonstrated. Performance below the HD-FEC limit is demonstrated for 8-bits/symbol 1-GBd signals after transmission up to 207 km of SSMF

Dual polarization nonlinear Fourier transform-based optical communication system

New services and applications are causing an exponential increase in internet traffic. In a few years, current fiber optic communication system infrastructure will not be able to meet this demand because fiber nonlinearity dramatically limits the information transmission rate. Eigenvalue communication could potentially overcome these limitations. It relies on a mathematical technique called "nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT)" to exploit the "hidden" linearity of the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation as the master model for signal propagation in an optical fiber. We present here the theoretical tools describing the NFT for the Manakov system and report on experimental transmission results for dual polarization in fiber optic eigenvalue communications. A transmission of up to 373.5 km with bit error rate less than the hard-decision forward error correction threshold has been achieved. Our results demonstrate that dual-polarization NFT can work in practice and enable an increased spectral efficiency in NFT-based communication systems, which are currently based on single polarization channels

Collective dynamics of evanescently coupled excitable lasers with saturable absorber

We present a numerical study of the collective dynamics in a population of coupled excitable lasers with saturable absorber. At variance with previous studies where real-valued (lossy) coupling was considered, we focus here on the purely imaginary coupling (evanescent wave coupling). We show that evanescently coupled excitable lasers exhibit synchronization like the lossy coupled ones. Furthermore, we show that out-of-diagonal disorder-induced localization of excitability takes place for imaginary coupling too, but it can be frustrated by nonvanishing linewidth enhancement factor. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]

Array-enhanced synchronization and coherence resonance in coupled excitable semiconductor lasers

Summary form only given. We present a numerical study of the nonlinear dynamics of a population of coupled semiconductor lasers with saturable absorber operating in the excitable regime [1] and described by a set of coupled Yamada models [2]. In particular we have investigated the self-organized synchronization process taking place spontaneously among the lasers, showing significant correlations between the spike-like pulses emitted by different lasers. Our findings demonstrate that synchronization in time and also in intensity occurs in a large region of the parameter space and for different population sizes and furthermore it is robust with respect to random distribution of the lasers' pump parameter which is linked to the excitability threshol