2015: a retrospect

 HAPPY NEW YEAR 2016 !!

I want to share with all our Blog readers a retrospect of events in 2015. As it happens to me, I hope this short account will help you in planning your 2016.

Though The Physics of Twisted Light - Solid Interaction appeared online on April 2014, 2015 is too an important year to me: it is the first full year of posting. We have covered several interesting aspects such as the interaction with bulk, nanostructures, the effect of Coulomb interaction, the importance of coordinate system, gauge invariance, etc. I am specially thankful to our external contributors: Nathan Clayburn from University of Nebraska-Lincoln - USA and Björn Sbierski from Freie Universität Berlin - Germany, who took the time to write interesting posts in their research, giving their own perspective and making the blog more interesting and diverse!

Research on the interaction of twisted light and solid-state systems was presented at many conferences. Perhaps the most representative one is the ICOAM 2015 held in New York, a conference fully devoted to the optical angular momentum. Other international general conferences and workshops where our colleagues presented their research were: JVBT Joint Workshop (Taiwan), CLEO Europe 2015 (Germany), Solidos 2015 (Argentina), EMN Phuket 2015, Thailand, EDISON 19 (Spain), and CLEO 2015 (USA). Incidentally, Miles Padgett was given the chance to talk about twisted light in a CLEO 2015 plenary session together with several Nobel Prize winners, contributing much to make the subject better known.

The amount of research done has grown compared to previous years, measured from the number of researchers, publications and citations. People published theoretical and experimental results in conference proceedings and international journals, such as Phys. Rev. A, Phys. Rev. B, New Journal of Physics,  Superlattices and Microstructures, Applied Physics Letters, etc. I would like to draw special attention to people and groups that published in 2015 for the first time in the topic [1]:

Vollrath Martin Axt Group
Insensitivity of spin dynamics to the orbital angular momentum transferred from twisted light to extended semiconductors
M. Cygorek, P.I. Tamborenea and V.M. Axt - Phys. Rev. B 92, 115301 (2015)

James M. Kikkawa Group
Time-resolved orbital angular momentum spectroscopy
MA Noyan, JM Kikkawa - Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 032406 (2015)

Koray Köksal Group
Quantum size effect on the electronic transitions of GaAs/AlGaAs dots under twisted light
F Koç, K Köksal - Superlattices and Microstructures, Volume 85, September 2015, Pages 599–607

Doris E Reiter
Optical control of exciton and spin states in a quantum dot by excitation with twisted light
T Kuhn, DE Reiter, GF Quinteiro - Journal of Physics: Conference Series 647 (1), 012012 (2015)

Mark Siemens Group
Measuring Orbital Angular Momentum of Light With a Single, Stationary Lens
SN Alperin, ME Siemens, RD Niederriter, J Gopinath
CLEO: Science and Innovations, JTu5A. 14 (2015)

I wish them success in the subject, and I look forward to reading future publications in 2016 ! 

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In 2016 I will continue with the dissemination of research on twisted light and solid-state system done by me, collaborators and others. Moreover, I plan to add news, hoping that the Blog will help us all to be up-to-date and make the communication between us easier. I will be happy to receive your comments, news and article contributions, just write to me !


Footnote

[1]  I apologize in advance for any involuntary omission. Please send an email to let me know, and I will make the appropriate correction.