Photonics is a branch of optics that involves the application of generation, detection, and manipulation of light in form of photons through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and sensing. Photonics is closely related to quantum electronics, where quantum electronics deals with the theoretical part of it while photonics deal with its engineering applications. Though covering all light's technical applications over the whole spectrum, most photonic applications are in the range of visible and near-infrared light. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.
University of Erlangen–Nuremberg is a public research university in the cities of Erlangen and Nuremberg in Bavaria, Germany. The name Friedrich–Alexander comes from the university's first founder Friedrich, Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, and its benefactor Alexander, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach.
An optical microcavity or microresonator is a structure formed by reflecting faces on the two sides of a spacer layer or optical medium, or by wrapping a waveguide in a circular fashion to form a ring. The former type is a standing wave cavity, and the latter is a traveling wave cavity. The name microcavity stems from the fact that it is often only a few micrometers thick, the spacer layer sometimes even in the nanometer range. As with common lasers, this forms an optical cavity or optical resonator, allowing a standing wave to form inside the spacer layer or a traveling wave that goes around in the ring.
The Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics is a Max Planck Institute whose research is aimed at investigating Einstein's theory of relativity and beyond: Mathematics, quantum gravity, astrophysical relativity, and gravitational-wave astronomy. The institute was founded in 1995 and is located in the Potsdam Science Park in Golm, Potsdam and in Hannover where it closely collaborates with the Leibniz University Hannover. Both the Potsdam and the Hannover parts of the institute are organized in three research departments and host a number of independent research groups.
The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, in short Leibniz Prize, is awarded by the German Research Foundation to "exceptional scientists and academics for their outstanding achievements in the field of research". Since 1986, up to ten prizes are awarded annually to individuals or research groups working at a research institution in Germany or at a German research institution abroad. It is considered the most important research award in Germany.
Philip St. John Russell, FRS, is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. His area of research covers "photonics and new materials", in particular the examination of new optical materials, especially of photonic crystal fibres, and more generally the field of nano- and micro-structured photonic materials.
Peter Zoller is a theoretical physicist from Austria. He is Professor at the University of Innsbruck and works on quantum optics and quantum information and is best known for his pioneering research on quantum computing and quantum communication and for bridging quantum optics and solid state physics.
Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain, known professionally as Ignacio Cirac, is a Spanish physicist. He is one of the pioneers of the field of quantum computing and quantum information theory. He is the recipient of the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award in technical and scientific research.
The Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics is a part of the Max Planck Society which operates 87 research facilities in Germany.
Girish S. Agarwal, Fellow of the Royal Society UK, is a theoretical physicist. He is currently at the Texas A & M University with affiliations to the Departments of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, and the Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering. Earlier he worked as Noble Foundation Chair and the Regents Professor at the Oklahoma State University. He is a recognized leader in the field of quantum optics and also has made major contributions to the fields of nonlinear optics, nanophotonics and plasmonics. In 2013 he published the textbook "Quantum Optics", covering a wide range of recent developments in the field, which has been well received by the community.
Colin Sheppard, usually cited as C. J. R. Sheppard, is senior scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa, Italy. Previously, he was professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Faculty of Engineering for National University of Singapore (2003–2012). He has held joint appointments with the NUS Departments of Biological Sciences and Diagnostic Radiology. He was SMART Faculty Fellow, and Adjunct Research Staff at SERI.
Immanuel Bloch is a German experimental physicist. His research is focused on the investigation of quantum many-body systems using ultracold atomic and molecular quantum gases. Bloch is known for his work on atoms in artificial crystals of light, optical lattices, especially the first realization of a quantum phase transition from a weakly interacting superfluid to a strongly interacting Mott insulating state of matter.
Mikhail Lukin ; born 10 October 1971) is a Russian theoretical and experimental physicist and a professor at Harvard University. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Jelena Vučković is a Serbian-born American professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and a courtesy faculty member in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. Vučković leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics (NQP) Lab, and is a faculty member of the Ginzton Lab, PULSE Institute, SIMES Institute, and Bio-X at Stanford. She was the inaugural director of the Q-FARM initiative. She is a Fellow of The Optical Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Christine Silberhorn is a German physicist specialising in quantum optics, full professor at the Paderborn University. In 2011, Silberhorn was awarded the Leibniz Prize and was the youngest recipient of the 2.5 million Euro prize at that time.
Alexandra Boltasseva is Ron And Dotty Garvin Tonjes Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, and editor-in-chief for The Optical Society's Optical Materials Express journal. Her research focuses on plasmonic metamaterials, manmade composites of metals that use surface plasmons to achieve optical properties not seen in nature.
Harald Schwefel is a German-born physicist currently based in New Zealand. He is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Otago and a principal investigator in the Dodd-Walls Centre. His research focuses on the interaction of light and matter in dielectric materials, and his speciality is whispering gallery mode resonators (WGMRs), small disks of dielectric which confine and store laser light to facilitate nonlinear interactions. He uses these to generate optical frequency combs and to coherently convert between microwave and optical photons.
Nathalie Picqué is a French physicist working at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in the field Frequency Combs, where she studies ultra-high resolution spectroscopy using ultrashort pulses of light combined with Fourier-transform spectroscopy to reveal the fine chemistry of samples, in particular in the mid-infrared, demonstrating resolving power in excess of 1,000,000,000,000.
Maria V. Chekhova is a Russian-German physicist known for her research on quantum optics and in particular on the quantum entanglement of pairs of photons. She is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany, where she heads an independent research group on quantum radiation, and a professor at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, in the chair of experimental physics (optics).
Pascal Del'Haye is a German physicist specializing in integrated photonics. He is heading the Microphotonics Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light.
