Guiding light into the millennium

Abstract

This paper explores our research on guiding light for communications, manipulating light, and extracting information from light. I describe how early research on visual photoceptor optics inspired the scalar (weak guidance) approximation of optical waveguides and how that same approximation elegantly leads to the Schrodinger wave equation description of spatial solitons. I also describe how spatial soliton dynamics, once the province of esoteric mathematics, became accessible with the undergraduate physics of linear waveguides and how this approach is a powerful tool for predicting new soliton phenomena and for dreaming up device applications.