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Research activities
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Spencer is investigating structured ultrafast light pulses and their interaction with matter. This includes fundamental aspects of pulse propagation and nonlinear optics in multi-mode waveguides. A specific aspect of his work is the so-called space-time couplings where an ultrafast light pulse has non-separable correlations between their space and time properties, and their extension to vector and vortex beams. His work is mostly theoretical at the moment, but is aiming towards experiments in the near future with a number of promising avenues.
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Teaching activities
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Tutor for the BA2 project (23-24, 24-25, 25-26)
TP for the course of Optical Microscopy (Q1 24-25, Q1 25-26)
Lecturer for first-year Electromagnetism at Solvay school (Q2 24-25, Q2 25-26)
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Biography
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Born in Evansville, Indiana in 1983, Spencer studied engineering physics at the University of Michigan, USA followed by a masters in physics at the University of Texas in 2014. He then moved to Europe and worked on laser-plasma acceleration and THz generation at DESY in Hamburg, Germany under the supervision of Andreas Maier and Franz Kärtner. After achieving his PhD at the University of Hamburg in early 2018, he undertook a PostDoc at the CEA outside of Paris for two years and then 10 months at the VUB in Brussels (with a year break in-between to care for his son). He is since Oct 2025 a Chargé de Cours (Assistant Professor) at OPERA.
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Publications
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A selection of recent publications:
Propagation of space-time optical vortices in multimode fibers, S. W. Jolly, J. Dechanxhe, & P. Kockaert, Journal of Optics 27, 075503 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1088/2040-8986/adecb0
Accessing different higher-order modes with beam self-cleaning under simple realistic tuning of initial conditions, J. Dechanxhe, P. Kockaert, & S. W. Jolly, Optics Continuum 4, 1489–1504 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1364/OPTCON.561121
Relativistic Electrons from Vacuum Laser Acceleration Using Tightly Focused Radially Polarized Beams, J. Powell, S. W. Jolly, et al, Physical Review Letters 133, 155001 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.155001
Control of vortex orientation of ultrashort optical pulses using spatial chirp, M. A. Porras and S. W. Jolly, Optics Letters 48, (2023). https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.506253