For device applications, structural disorder and optical scattering have long been considered annoying and detrimental features that were best avoided or minimized. In this talk, I will show that disorder and complexity can be harnessed for photonic applications, in particular, to provide unique functionalities of photonic devices. We recently developed an on-chip random spectrometer that combines high resolution with small footprint. In addition, we incorporated disorder to a laser to reduce the spatial coherence for free-speckle full-field imaging, and to disrupt coherent nonlinear coupling of lasing modes to suppress temporal instabilities.
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