FEMTO-ST institute – UMR 6174 CNRS/UFC/ENSMM/UTBM

© Ludovic Godard (UFC)

Originally from South Auckland in New Zealand, John is a professor at Université de Franche-Comté (Besançon) where he heads the Optoelectronics and Photonics research group within FEMTO-ST Institute (Department of Optics).

John’s research activities focus equally on experimental and theoretical studies in nonlinear optics, with particular emphasis on optical fibre propagation, ultrafast pulse metrology, noise and instabilities, and nonlinear dynamics in general. He is author or co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed international papers and more than 120 invited conferences, among which 30 are plenary, keynote or tutorial presentations. He has co-authored a 2010 book on supercontinuum generation in optical fibres.
John is also member of the Labex ACTION (Information processing systems).

Among other distinctions, he was awarded in 2009 the Grand Prix de l’Electronique Général Ferrié from the Société des Electriciens et Electroniciens (SEE) and has also received a research award from the IXCORE Foundation. He was a Deputy Editor of the OSA journal Optics Express, and he participated in IEEE, OSA and SPIE Travelling Lecturer programmes. He has been elected as a Fellow of the IEEE in 2011 and a Fellow of the European Optical Society in 2012, and received the CNRS Silver Medal in 2013.

He is serving as President of the European Physical Society until 2015.

Holder of 2 ERC grants :

• ERC MULTIWAVE (2011-2016, with Professor Frederic Dias of UCD Dublin), which is exploring new insights into the fundamental mechanisms underlying the physics of rogue waves – large scale coherent structures emerging from a noisy or turbulent environment.
• ERC Proof of Concept WAVEMEASUREMENT (calibration of extreme wave measurement on the ocean surface); project implemented in collaboration with an Irish SME TechWorks Marine, a company specializing in ocean instrumentation. Commercial applications, if successful, would include marine renewable energies, shipping, marine forecasting, and ocean observation.

Chairman of the international steering committee of International Year of Light 2015
As a major worldwide achievement in science, technology, education, sustainable development, humanitarian action, and culture, John Dudley has launched and led since 2012 the organization of the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies 2015 (IYL 2015), that was officially announced by UNESCO in oct. 2012, then by UN in dec. 2013. He is currently chairing the international steering committee of IYL 2015, for which he was awarded the SPIE President’s Award in 2014 and the 2015 OSA Robert E. Hopkins Leadership Award.

See also : Celebrating Solitons – Nonlinear Science with Light / 10.11.2015 (FEMTO-ST)

Lastest Review Article: “Instabilities, Breathers and Rogue Waves in Optics”
Dudley John Michael, Dias Frédéric, Erkintalo Miro and Genty Goëry
Nature Photonics, vol. 8, pp. 755 – 764, sep. 2014
(28 citations – WoS Highly Cited Paper, 2014 Impact Factor: 32.4)

Optical rogue waves are rare, extreme fluctuations in the value of an optical field. The term ‘optical rogue wave’ was first used in the context of an analogy between pulse propagation in an optical fibre and wave group propagation on deep water, but has since been generalized to describe many other processes in optics. This Review provides an overview of the field, concentrating primarily on propagation in optical fibre systems that exhibit nonlinear breather and soliton dynamics, but also discussing other optical systems in which extreme events have been reported.
Although statistical features such as long-tailed probability distributions are often considered to be the defining feature of rogue waves, we emphasize the underlying physical processes that drive the appearance of extreme optical structures.

Other pioneering results or breakthrough papers :

Real-time full bandwidth measurement of spectral noise in supercontinuum generation
Wetzel B., Stefani A., Larger L., Lacourt PA, Merolla JM, Sylvestre T,, K. Alexandre, M. Arnaud, Genty G., Dias F. and Dudley JM,
Scientific Reports, pp. 882, nov. 2012 (37 citations – 2014 Impact Factor: 5.6)
Selected by the Optical Society of America (OSA) as a worldwide achievement in optics and photonics for the year 2013.

Sending femtosecond pulses in circles: highly nonparaxial accelerating beams
Courvoisier F., Mathis A., Froehly L., Giust R., Furfaro L., Lacourt PA, Jacquot M. and Dudley JM
Optics Letters, vol. 37, 10, pp. 1736 – 1738, may. 2012 (53 citations)
Selected by the Optical Society of America (OSA) as a worldwide achievement in optics and photonics for the year 2012

Supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fiber” (Invited Review Paper)
Dudley, JM, Genty, G, Coen, S
Reviews of modern physics, Volume: 78, Issue: 4,Pages: 1135-1184, Published: OCT-DEC 2006
(1461 citations – WoS Highly Cited Paper, 2010 Impact Factor: 51.7)
This paper was the ONLY French paper in the worldwide TOP 10 of the most highly cited papers in Physics & Astronomy during the 5 years after its publication (source: Scopus highly cited).

See also the lastest UBFC publications in Optics/Photonics :

Deviation from threshold model in ultrafast laser ablation of graphene at sub-micron scale
Gil-Villalba, A.; Xie, C.; Salut, R.; et al. (Dudley, J)
Applied Pysics letters  Volume: 107   Issue: 6     Article Number: 061103   Published: AUG 10 2015

Giant thermo-optical relaxation oscillations in millimeter-size whispering gallery mode disk resonators
Diallo, Souleymane; Lin, Guoping; Chembo, Yanne K.
Optics letters  Volume: 40   Issue: 16   Pages: 3834-3837   Published: AUG 15 2015

Ultrabroadband fiber optical parametric amplifier pumped by chirped pulses. Part 2: sub-30-fs pulse amplification at high gain
Fourcade-Dutin, Coralie; Vanvincq, Olivier; Mussot, Arnaud; et al.
Journal of the optical society of America B-Optical Physics Volume: 32   Issue: 7   Pages: 1488-1493   Published: JUL 1 2015

Further information about John Dudley : https://sites.google.com/site/dudleyphotonics/

Ludovic Godard (UFC)