Theodoros Horikis
Theodoros Horikis studied Physics at the University of Crete and obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College, London, in Applied Mathematics. He worked as a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Peloponnese. Currently, he is a full professor with the Department of Mathematics, University of Ioannina, and his main research interests are physical applied mathematics, nonlinear waves and nonlinear evolution differential equations.
Light and water: Two unlike partners
Many physically different subjects can be brought together through their common modelling and mathematical description. Perhaps the most common (and rather unlike) example is water waves and nonlinear optics. Two equations are inextricably linked with both subjects: the universal Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) and nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) equations. In fact, these systems can be reduced from one to the other, thus suggesting that phenomena occurring in water waves will also exist in optics. In this talk, we demonstrate a direct analogue of surface tension in optics; surface tension, is the phenomenon that causes fluids to minimize the area they occupy. The goal is to demonstrate how, by adjusting the surface tension optics analogue, different solutions and patterns, as observed in shallow waters, can also be observed in optics/light and hence, shallow water wave phenomena may find their analogue in optics.
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