Unitary Transformations via Temporal Trapping
Research in the Logan Wright Applied Physics Lab at Yale. In a fiber, a strong pulse changes the refractive index that a co-propagating weak pulse sees (cross-phase modulation), acting as a programmable temporal trap. The goal is to shape the trap so that the fiber applies a chosen unitary transformation to the weak pulse's Hermite-Gauss modes.
I built an automatically differentiable coupled NLSE solver in PyTorch, packaged as a small library, and a training pipeline that finds the trap by gradient descent through the simulation. I then studied which loss functions and optimizers actually recover phase-correct unitaries, how performance scales with the number of modes, and a first ring-resonator variant.