Dimitris Papazoglou Assistant Professor, Affiliated faculty IESL-FORTH Senior member of the UNIS group PhD: 1998, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Physics Research activity is taking place in IESL-FORTH facilities Ultra-intense nonlinear interactions and sources (UNIS) lab Bibliometric info: 42 publications, 304 citations, h factor: 11 General research area: Optics (experimentalist)

Nonlinear interactions of ultra-short laser pulses with transparent media Exotic optical waves and light bullets Wavefront sensing and manipulation Research activities Active collaborations Stelios Tzortzakis (IESL-FORTH) Nikos Efremidis (UOC) George Stegeman (CREOL) Demetrios Christodoulides (CREOL)

Physical mechanism ? Thermal process Photochemical process Most of the experimental results were inconclusive since they were based on the post processing of the samples Photonic structuring in transparent media D.G. Papazoglou et al., Opt. Lett. 31, 1441 (2006), D. G. Papazoglou et al., Opt. Lett., 32, 2055 (2007), D.G. Papazoglou et al., (invited) to appear in Optical Materials Express (2011) By in-situ studying the spatiotemporal dynamics we are lead to a better understanding of the physical process. Our results clearly support a photochemical mechanism for low repetition rate laser sources!

i-HOM (In-line holographic microscopy) Spatial distribution of the perturbed refractive index and respective electron density in a central longitudinal section of a plasma string formed in air High resolution pump-probe experimental technique that is capable of resolving small refractive index changes (~ ) in  m sized focal volumes D.G. Papazoglou et al, Appl. Phys. Lett., 93, (2008)

Using coma aberration to generate intense Airy beams Coma aberration  Cubic phase ! G. A. Siviloglou, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 99, (2007) Airy beams are a non- dispersive solution of the 1D paraxial propagation equation Optical aberrations can be envisioned as a way to impose polynomial phase distributions on plane wave! D. G. Papazoglou, et al., Phys. Rev. A, 81, (R) (2010) cubic phase modulation

Spatiotemporal Airy Light Bullets in the Linear and Nonlinear Regimes D. Abdollahpour, et. al. Phys. Rev. Lett., 105, (2010) By combining a spatial Airy beam with an Airy pulse in time we have generated intense Airy-Airy-Airy (Airy 3 ) light bullets The Airy 3 light bullets do not require any specific tuning of the material optical properties for their formation and withstand both diffraction and dispersion during their propagation. The Airy 3 light bullets are robust up to the high intensity regime since they are capable of self- healing the nonlinearly induced distortions of their spatiotemporal profile Intensity iso-surface of the experimentally realized Airy 3 light bullet Spatiotemporal self healing of the Airy 3 light bullet