The Department of Physics in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences presents its Physics Colloquium, titled "Photon Localization in Disordered Media" by Andrey Chabanov of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Texas at San Antonio. The lecture will be from 4-5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 3, in PHYS 133. Refreshments will begin at 3:30 p.m. in PHYS 134.

Localization is inherently a wave interference phenomenon and may therefore occur for all manner of excitations including electromagnetic, sound and ultrasound, acoustic and optic phonons, surface plasmons, polaritons, electrons and atoms. Signatures of localization are observed in a constellation of transport phenomena which reflect the transition from diffusive to localized waves.

For example, the dimensionless conductance, the ratio of the typical spectral width and spacing of quasi-modes are key indicators of electron and classical wave localization when inelastic processes are absent, whereas the statistics of transport are used to determine localization in the presence of absorption. The intertwined effects of localization and absorption can also be disentangled in the time domain since all waves emerging from the sample at a fixed time delay from an exciting pulse are suppressed equally by absorption. In this talk, we will discuss our steady-state and pulsed measurements of electromagnetic localization in low-density collections of disordered dielectric spheres in quasi-1D geometry, and how photon localization can be understood in the context of mesoscopic transport theory.

Chabanov has a doctorate in physics from the City University of New York (2002), postdocs at University of Minnesota-Minneapolis (2002-2004) and Northwestern University (2005). Since then he has been with University of Texas at San Antonio, where he is an associate professor.

Chabanov is an experimentalist. His research concerns fundamental and applied aspects of wave transport in complex media, including random and structured media such as photonics crystals. He has about 50 journal publications, including Nature, Phys Rev and Phys Rev Lett, and Applied Phys Lett. His research has been supported by NSF and AROSR.