Murat Yessenov

Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University

The Montgomery Effect as a Platform for Sub-Micron Spot Arrays via Dielectric Metasurfaces

The Montgomery effect, an aperiodic self-imaging phenomenon, offers an underexplored route for structured light engineering. I will present a spatially structured Montgomery effect generated by dielectric metasurface, demonstrating one-dimensional arrays of up to 50 tightly localized sub-micron spots, opening pathways to scalable optical trapping, nanoscale lithography, and multiplane microcopy.

Murat Yessenov is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences under the supervision of Federico Capasso. His research focuses on investigating meta-optics capable of spatiotemporal shaping optical fields. Based on the previous efforts on dispersion-engineering of achromatic meta-lens and inverse-designed metasurfaces, Murat is interested in joint manipulation of light in spatial and temporal domains with application in structured light manipulation, nonlinear phase matching and optical atom trapping. Previously, his research focused on rotated chirped volume Bragg gratings for spectral analysis and pulse shaping in a compact form factor. Murat earned his Ph. D. at the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL), University of Central Florida in Ayman Abouraddy’s group. During his Ph.D., he pioneered research on space-time wave packets—a novel class of spatiotemporally structured optical fields, where he developed the first free space optical setup to generate 3D space-time wave packets.

Murat’s Ph.D. work received multiple recognitions, including the Emil Wolf Outstanding Student Paper Award from OPTICA (2020), the Laser Technology, Engineering, and Applications Scholarship from SPIE (2022), the Boris P. Stoicheff Memorial Scholarship from OPTICA (2022), and the CREOL Student of the Year Award (2022). He has co-authored over 50 journal articles and 3 patents.