Heping Zeng - Biography#

Heping Zeng, Chair Professor at East China Normal University, was elected as an OPTICA Fellow in 2016, and served as a Topical Editor for Optical Letters, Guest Editor for Nanomaterials, Editors for Light:Science & Applications, European Physical Journal D, Scientific Reports, Acta Optica Sinica, and Modern Applied Physics. He has published 490 peer-reviewed papers, granted 180 Chinese patents and 30 U.S. patents. His work has been featured in more than 40 figures/tables by peer-reviewed papers as benchmark achievements. He has chaired/co-chaired over 30 international academic conferences and delivered more than 50 plenary, keynote, and invited presentations in prestigious conferences.

Heping Zeng discovered serval ultrafast spatiotemporal strong coupling effects and proposed a spatiotemporally-coupled dual-cavity enhancement technique, which has been promptly validated and world-widely cited by international peers as a key method for generating extreme ultraviolet frequency combs and high-repetition attosecond lasers. He also made a technological breakthrough on high-order chirp-pre-compensated self-similar amplification achieving unprecedent 100W high-precision of fs frequency combs and developed world-leading adaptive dual-comb spectrometers resistant to noisy disturbance under harsh field environments.

Heping Zeng revealed the long-standing mode-locking buildup mystery, providing fundamental basis and theoretical framework on mode-locking evolution through nonlinear competition, discovered a novel mode-locking mechanism below the conventional mode-locking threshold: breathing mode-locking, overturning the traditional mode-locking threshold theory, and invented robust mode-locking techniques based on soliton explosion, making fs lasers with unprecedented high stability. He proposed a new concept of fractal frequency combs and made a series of breakthrough discoveries on fractal locking among intrinsic frequencies in breather lasing, fractal self-locking in THz QCLs, and the long-searched anomalous Arnold-tongues synchronization as proposed 30 years ago. He further discovered modulated subharmonics as a novel fractal, and sequential modulated subharmonics as a newly-found universal route to chaos, presenting a breakthrough of nonlinear complexity and critical phenomena that only three universal routes have been recognized over half a century.

Heping Zeng developed a novel sub-saturation gated mode for efficient single-photon detection at room temperature, overcame the almost-impossible challenges of quantum detection under strong white-light background with breakthrough multi-pixel and sequential pulse coincidence detection, and deployed important applications in space debris detection, synchronous satellite laser ranging and satellite ground observation. He further developed a novel synchronously pumped single-photon frequency up-conversion detection method, and made milestone progress on long-challenged mid-infrared single-photon detection and imaging.