AZAM , Pierre

In this thesis, we are interested in the propagation of a laser beam through a rubidium hot atomic vapour. Due to the Kerr-like non-linearity of the medium, the light will present, during its evolution in the vapour, a behaviour that can be described by the non-linear Schrödinger equation (or Gross-Pitaevskii equation) which is equivalent to...

Machine learning is becoming a widely used technique with impressive growth due to the diversity of problems of societal interest for which it can offer practical solutions. This increase of applications and required resources start to become limited by present-day hardware technologies. Indeed, novel machine learning subjects such as large...

International audience

We present experimental and theoretical results on formation of quantum vortices in a laser beam propagating in a nonlinear medium. Topological constrains richer that the mere conservation of vorticity impose an elaborate dynamical behavior to the formation and annihilation of vortex/anti-vortex pairs. We identify two such mechanisms, both...

We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a two-dimensional paraxial fluid of light using a near-resonant laser propagating through a hot atomic vapor. We observe a double shock-collapse instability: a shock (gradient catastrophe) for the velocity, as well as an annular (ring-shaped) collapse singularity for the density. We find experimental...