26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Session

ANZCOP: Topological & Non-Hermitian Photonics

ANZCOP

7 Dec 2026, 11:30

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

544. Symmetry broken optical resonators as sources of probabilistic bits

Stephane Coen (Department of Physics, University of Auckland)

07/12/2026, 11:30

ANZOS | Photonics and Optics (ANZCOP)

Contributed Oral

Conventional computing architectures rely on deterministic bits, ensuring consistent and repeatable operations. This paradigm can however be inefficient when modelling systems in which randomness plays a fundamental role. In contrast, probabilistic bits (P-bits), which fluctuate between binary states according to a controllable probability distribution, provide an attractive alternative for...

535. Bogoliubov excitations of a Bose-Einstein condensate in the presence of the non-Hermitian skin effect

Carlo Panu (Institute of Condensed Matter Theory and Solid State Optics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Max-Wien-Platz 1, 07743 Jena, Germany 2Department of Quantum Science and Technology, Research School of Physics, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia)

07/12/2026, 12:00

ANZOS | Photonics and Optics (ANZCOP)

Contributed Oral

The non-Hermitian skin effect is one of the most remarkable topological features of non-conservative physics. It causes a macroscopic accumulation of states at the boundaries of a confined system, opening new ways for controlling waves in photonic, mechanical, and other non-Hermitian systems. This effect has recently been observed in nonlinear bosonic experiments with Bose-Einstein condensates...

751. Non-Hermitian Photonics: Topological Singularities and Unidirectional Resonances

Dmitrii Murinov (Australian National University)

07/12/2026, 12:15

ANZOS | Photonics and Optics (ANZCOP)

Contributed Oral

Non-Hermitian and topological photonics have jointly sparked recent interest in the manifestation of spectral degeneracies and polarisation defects for radiation control. Here we study several types of non-Hermitian metaphotonic structures that support both topological singularities in polarisation fields, such as C-points (points of purely circular polarisation), and spectral singularities,...

230. Simple and Controllable Nonlinear​ Optical Reservoir Computing​

Leandro Risso Venâncio (The University of Queensland; University of Exeter)

07/12/2026, 12:30

ANZOS | Photonics and Optics (ANZCOP)

Contributed Oral

Nonlinear mappings lie at the core of modern machine learning models, underpinning their success in highly complex tasks. In optical neural networks (ONNs), nonlinearities are traditionally generated through higher-order light–matter interactions, commonly by encoding information in the electric field and measuring the response of specific optical materials. However, nonlinear encoding can...

577. Polarization Symmetry Breaking for Spin-based Computing

Liam Quinn (The University of Auckland)

07/12/2026, 12:45

ANZOS | Photonics and Optics (ANZCOP)

Contributed Oral

Probabilistic computing aims to leverage randomness to solve difficult computational problems more efficiently than conventional methods. Photonic systems are particularly attractive owing to their ultrafast speeds, inherent parallelism, and access to quantum-limited noise sources. Existing photonic approaches have demonstrated applications ranging from random-number generation to Ising...