USC Viterbi School of Engineering team demonstrates first optical device based on “optical thermodynamics." Credit: Yunxuan Wei at USC A research group from the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has achieved a major advance in photonics with the creation of the first optical device built on the emerging concept of optical thermodynamics. Their findings, published in Nature Photonics , reveal an entirely new way to control and direct light in nonlinear systems (systems