An important anniversary next week! 20 years since I left @UoA_Physics in beautiful Aotearoa to live in beautiful Besançon. In the best academic tradition, must be time for a 20 year Activity Report! Thread follows: @fc_univ @FemtoSt @INSIS_CNRS @CNRS_Centre_Est 
Important caveat. Don’t believe for a second that everything ran smoothly! Many failures - rejected papers & funding, most ideas went nowhere, many mistakes. But you keep at it and with LOTS of help you somehow get somewhere in the end.
2000. Arrived in August with only 4 weeks' notice of classes to teach! Fitted in 3 days at CLEO Europe in September to hear people buzzing about something called PCF supercontinuum. Found lab space, @ProfBenEggleton magicked the fibre, and started to see what the fuss was about.
2001. With Laurent Provino & Hervé Maillotte, we saw a nanosecond supercontinuum & with Stephane Coen, studied the femtosecond regime as well. In the long-gone wonderful days of pre-impact factor obsession, publishing quickly in Electronics Letters was the way to go!
2002. By quantifying spectral coherence, modelling explained the pulse-duration dependence of supercontinuum stability, an important result at the time. Also had a lot of fun with @libroraptor writing about the history of refraction in @PhysicsWorld
2002. Rick Trebino's book gave me the chance to revisit some complex TiS laser FROG results which had been rejected many times until appearing (& getting lost) in Appl. Opt. Too early to be interesting? Today we might call these ZDW-spanning supercontinuum dissipative solitons!
2003. But this experience with complex FROG structure came in very handy when studying the supercontinuum in the time-frequency domain. With Stephane Coen we looked at experiments by Rick Trebino, and this work ended up in @OPNmagazine Optics in 2003. Timing is everything?
2004. Started working with @LaboICB during the PhD of @ChrisFINOT & co-organized a School with Guy Millot with star speakers (incl @im_sergei & @StefanWabnitz). After my talk, Philip Russell & Rick Trebino suggested the supercontinuum field needed a review. Who'd be that crazy?
2005. A supercontinuum review was too much for just me & Stephane so @GGoery joined the fun! Meanwhile in the lab @FemtoSt we looked at self-similar evolution in fibres with @UniofBathSci & I still think the results below are amongst the most beautiful in nonlinear optics!
2006. After 18 months writing & review the RMP appeared in October 2006. As an aside, a very senior local colleague at the time advised me that spending so much time on just one paper was a bad career move. I learned a valuable lesson in trusting myself to ignore stupid advice!
2007. Meanwhile with very innovative modelling @GGoery showed that envelopes did not need to be “slowly varying”, putting on firm foundations what people were assuming (or hoping!) was the case anyway. And a paper with @ChrisFINOT on self-similarity in @NaturePhysics
2008. Starting to get into serious nonlinear physics and my first paper with @LaurentLarger Also with @GGoery & @ProfBenEggleton we start getting interested in understanding if optical rogue waves are a real thing or not. We certainly found "rogue solitons"!
2009. After a beverage with @GGoery & Nail Akhmediev in Munich, we unravelled the natural (in hindsight obvious) link between breathers, modulation instability & supercontinuum. With input from @FredericDiasUCD & experiments from Bertrand Kibler, it all fitted beautifully!
2010. Busy year. A book with the great Roy Taylor (includes chapters by @jctravs and many others) & lots of rogue waves, especially the Peregrine Soliton seen by Bertrand Kibler after we designed the experiment on the Besancon-Dijon TER! With @ChrisFINOT @FredericDiasUCD @GGoery
2010. Also a paper with @MErkintalo and @Benj_Wetzel which has flown under the radar a bit, but describes some limits that are absolutely crucial to understand if you want to avoid errors. If you model supercontinuum read this right now! osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cf…
2011. Having fun at @FemtoSt with Francois Courvoisier & Luc Froehly studying accelerating beams (results below are experimental btw!) And still uncovering subtleties in modulation instability experiments with @MErkintalo & @kh_ubfc using serious maths (Darboux transformation)
2011. Kicking off the idea of an International Year of Light at a wonderful @EuroPhysSoc and @SIF_it event in Varenna. Also met @joeniemela & other dignitaries for the first time! More background on the beginnings of the Year of Light initiative here: tinyurl.com/startofIYL
2012. Bertand Kibler & @ChrisFINOT extend the rogue wave family with the Kusnetsov-Ma soliton. @fredericdiasUCD and I celebrate with Kuznetsov & Zakharov as part of @ERC_research MULTIWAVE (cordis.europa.eu/project/id/290… )
2012. Another paper without much immediate interest perhaps but which I really like - randomness in the supercontinuum. With @Benj_Wetzel @im_sergei @LaurentLarger
2013. Doing some politics lobbying for the International Year of Light at the UN with @OpticalSociety @SPIEtweets @EuroPhysSoc Yanne Chembo & many others. And a nice opportunity to promote the importance of basic research.
2014. Being President of @europhysoc keeps me very busy, but somehow managed to contribute to sorting out how event horizons linked to nonlinear optics with @MErkintalo & @UoA_Physics and also a nice cover picture with @NaturePhotonics
2015 The International Year of Light was the focus of this year, trying to somehow speak at events around the world and follow what went on worldwide.
2016. Starting to work on real-world rogue waves with @FredericDiasUCD and the results are quite surprising ... But there are still many open questions and it's not cut and dried at all.
2017. Thanks to @fc_univ and @INSIS_CNRS, @FemtoSt is becoming a must-visit place on the conference calendar, and with help from @SylvestreT we were delighted this year to welcome @supuvir as well as @milespadgett and Michael Berry as special guests
2018. Succeeded in getting recognition of a permanent and annual International Day of Light with first kickoff on 16 May 2018, anniversary of the first laser operation! @IDLofficial is now a thing! Also managed to get some great results on real time measurements with @GGoery
2018. Thanks to @JeremyQuerenet @ClaireDupouet for all the outreach support. I am really not a fan of manipulative pseudoscience fakery and love the challenge to persuade that the world is even more wonderful when you understand it. Even firewalking is just physics!
2019. This year @IDLofficial was at @ictpnews which gives me the chance to thank @rachelpcwon @niemela @ptolemytortoise and @jesswade again for their fantastic support!
2019. Also great fun to write review of 10 years work on optical & hydrodynamic rogue wave with @FredericDiasUCD @GGoery @ArnaudMussot @DrAminChabchoub and new results continue to surprise thanks to great students like @cocolapre and @SpSolveig
2020. After twenty years, interesting to contemplate that perhaps AI will make us all redundant anyway, and this seems to be the direction we’re moving in with @salmelala !! (But not quite ready to retire just yet @GGoery @jctravs)
2020. So that's it. Thanks again especially for all the local support from @fc_univ @Univ_BFC @INSIS_CNRS @CNRS_Centre_Est @Jacques_Bahi @LaurentLarger @FemtoSt and the many many others without whom nothing would work!! And many apologies to all I inevitably missed.
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