Abstract:
Graphene is a relatively new 2D material consisting of carbon atoms in honeycomb
structure. Because of this structure, it has various interesting properties such as
linear dispersion relation in the low energy spectrum that governs relativistic nature
of electrons in graphene. Since there is an analogy between an electron wavepacket
dynamics in time and paraxial wave propagation in z-direction, a honeycomb lattice
of evanescently coupled optical waveguides, so called "photonic graphene", can be
used to study dynamics of optical wavepackets and to mimic quantum relativistic
behaviour in table-top experiments. Another interesting property of graphene is the
pseudospin that is associated with generation of vortices. The goal of the present
thesis is to investigate the unusual behaviour of the wavepacket in photonic graphene
by observing the role of pseudospin for discrete optical vortices in the photonic lattice.