Wolfgang Dultz
Wolfgang Dultz | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for | Polarization optics; the Pancharatnam–Berry geometric phase |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, optics |
| Institutions | Physikalisches Institut, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main; Deutsche Telekom |
Wolfgang Dultz is a German physicist working in optics, best known for his experimental and theoretical studies of the geometric (Pancharatnam–Berry) phase in polarization optics. He has been associated with the Physikalisches Institut of Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and with the research laboratories of Deutsche Telekom.
Biography
Dultz is an optical physicist based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research career spans university physics at Goethe University Frankfurt and industrial research for the German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom, where his interests included the optics of fibers and optical networks. He has published in journals and conference proceedings including Physical Review Letters, Applied Optics, Optics Communications and the Proceedings of SPIE. Much of his experimental work was carried out in collaboration with the Frankfurt physicist Werner Martienssen and co-workers such as H. Schmitzer, S. Klein, B. Hils and E. Frins.
Scientific work
Dultz's central contribution lies in the study of the Pancharatnam–Berry phase, a geometric phase acquired by a light beam when its state of polarization is carried around a closed circuit on the Poincaré sphere. For such a cyclic change of polarization the beam picks up a phase equal to half the solid angle (the area) enclosed by the path on the sphere, a purely geometric quantity that is independent of the dynamical (optical-path) phase.
With H. Schmitzer and S. Klein, Dultz reported on the nonlinearity of Pancharatnam's topological phase (Physical Review Letters, 1993), and in 1994 the group contributed the chapter "Pancharatnam's Topological Phase in Relation to the Dynamical Phase in Polarization Optics" to the volume Frontiers of Fundamental Physics, clarifying how the geometric phase relates to, and can be separated from, the ordinary dynamic phase in polarization experiments.
In related experiments, Dultz, Bernhard Hils and Werner Martienssen measured time-variable, nonlinear shifts of the fringe pattern in a polarizing interferometer and identified them with Pancharatnam's geometric phase, noting possible applications to interferometry and to fast optical switching. With E. Frins he observed Berry's phase in single-mode optical fiber by detecting contrast-enhanced fringe shifts of circularly polarized light in a ring interferometer. His broader work has covered practical polarization optics and optical components, including liquid-crystal spatial light modulators and polarization analyzers for characterizing optical components.
Selected publications
- 1993 - "Nonlinearity of Pancharatnam's topological phase" (with H. Schmitzer and S. Klein), Physical Review Letters.
- 1994 - "Pancharatnam's Topological Phase in Relation to the Dynamic Phase in Polarization Optics" (with S. Klein and H. Schmitzer), in Frontiers of Fundamental Physics.