Eli Yablonovitch is an American physicist and engineer who, along with Sajeev John, founded the field of photonic crystals in 1987. He and his team were the first to create a 3-dimensional structure that exhibited a full photonic bandgap, which has been named Yablonovite. In addition to pioneering photonic crystals, he was the first to recognize that a strained quantum-well laser has a significantly reduced threshold current compared to its unstrained counterpart. This is now employed in the majority of semiconductor lasers fabricated throughout the world. His seminal paper reporting inhibited spontaneous emission in photonic crystals is among the most highly cited papers in physics and engineering.
Gérard Albert Mourou is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, along with Donna Strickland, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification, a technique later used to create ultrashort-pulse, very high-intensity (petawatt) laser pulses.
SPIE is an international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technology, founded in 1955. It organizes technical conferences, trade exhibitions, and continuing education programs for researchers and developers in the light-based fields of physics, including: optics, photonics, and imaging engineering. The society publishes peer-reviewed scientific journals, conference proceedings, monographs, tutorial texts, field guides, and reference volumes in print and online. SPIE is especially well-known for Photonics West, one of the laser and photonics industry's largest combined conferences and tradeshows which is held annually in San Francisco. SPIE also participates as partners in leading educational initiatives, and in 2020, for example, provided more than $5.8 million in support of optics education and outreach programs around the world.
Federico Capasso is an applied physicist and is one of the inventors of the quantum cascade laser during his work at Bell Laboratories. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University.
Ataç İmamoğlu is a Turkish-Swiss physicist working on quantum optics and quantum computation. His academic interests are quantum optics, semiconductor physics, and nonlinear optics.
The Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis is an award for given to those who have created applied laser technology and innovations on the application or generation of laser light. It is open to participants worldwide. It is biennially awarded by the German non-profit foundation Berthold Leibinger Stiftung. Three prizes are awarded worth 100,000 euros. The prize winners are selected from eight finalists that present their work person in a jury session. The jury is composed of international experts from different fields.
The University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, considered the largest institute for optics education in the United States, is dedicated to research and education in optics with an emphasis on optical engineering. The college offers more than 90 courses in optical sciences, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Optical Sciences and Engineering, Masters and Doctoral degree programs in Optical Sciences, as well as a dual master's degree in Optical Sciences and Business Administration. The college also offers comprehensive distance learning courses leading to a Professional Graduate Certificate or a master's degree and markets non-credit short courses on DVD to optics professionals.
Anthony Michael Johnson is an American experimental physicist, a professor of physics, and a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). He is the director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research (CASPR), also situated on campus at UMBC. Since his election to the 2002 term as president of the Optical Society, formerly the Optical Society of America, Johnson has the distinction of being the first and only African-American president to date. Johnson's research interests include the ultrafast photophysics and nonlinear optical properties of bulk, nanostructured, and quantum well semiconductor structures, ultrashort pulse propagation in fibers and high-speed lightwave systems. His research has helped to better understand processes that occur in ultrafast time frames of 1 quadrillionth of a second. Ultrashort pulses of light have been used to address technical and logistical challenges in medicine, telecommunications, homeland security, and have many other applications that enhance contemporary life.
Robert Alfano is an Italian-American experimental physicist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering at the City College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers (1982). He is a pioneer in the fields of Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy, Ultrafast lasers and optics, tunable lasers, semiconductor materials and devices, optical materials, biophysics, nonlinear optics and photonics; he has also worked extensively in nanotechnology and coherent backscattering. His discovery of the white-light supercontinuum laser is at the root of optical coherence tomography, which is breaking barriers in ophthalmology, cardiology, and oral cancer detection among other applications. He initiated the field known now as Optical Biopsy
Amnon Yariv is an Israeli-American professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Caltech, known for innovations in optoelectronics. Yariv obtained his B.S., M.S. and PhD. in electrical engineering from University of California, Berkeley in 1954, 1956 and 1958, respectively.
Manijeh Razeghi is an Iranian-American scientist in the fields of semiconductors and optoelectronic devices. She is a pioneer in modern epitaxial techniques for semiconductors such as low pressure metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD), vapor phase epitaxy (VPE), molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), GasMBE, and MOMBE. These techniques have enabled the development of semiconductor devices and quantum structures with higher composition consistency and reliability, leading to major advancement in InP and GaAs based quantum photonics and electronic devices, which were at the core of the late 20th century optical fiber telecommunications and early information technology.
James J. Coleman is an electrical engineer who worked at Bell Labs, Rockwell International, and the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is best known for his work on semiconductor lasers, materials and devices including strained-layer indium gallium arsenide lasers and selective area epitaxy. Coleman is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.
Alexandra Boltasseva is Ron And Dotty Garvin Tonjes Distinguished 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.
Anne C. Tropper is a Professor of Physics at the University of Southampton. Her work considers solid-state and semiconductor lasers; specifically the development of ytterbium-doped silica fibre lasers and Vertical External-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers. She was elected a Fellow of The Optical Society in 2006, and awarded the 2021 SPIE Maiman Laser Award for her contributions to laser source science and technology.
Semiconductor saturable-absorber mirrors (SESAMs) are a type of saturable absorber used in mode locking lasers.
Alpes Lasers S.A. is a Swiss engineering company and manufacturer of Infrared lasers and electrical drivers based in St-Blaise, Canton of Neuchâtel. The company was the first to commercialize the quantum-cascade laser (QCL) for scientific, industrial and medical use. The company has also developed QCLs for defensive countermeasure applications for the United States Air Force.
Peter J. Delfyett Jr is an American engineer and Pegasus Professor and Trustee Chair Professor of Optics, ECE & Physics at the University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics.
Niels Quack is a Swiss and German engineer specialized in optical micro engineering. He is a SNSF professor at EPFL and director of the Photonic Micro- and Nanosystems Laboratory at its school of engineering.
Carmen S. Menoni is an Argentine-American physicist who is the University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University. Her research considers oxide materials for interference coatings and spectrometry imaging. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, American Physical Society, Optica, and SPIE. Menoni served as the President of the IEEE Photonics Society from 2020 to 2021.
Clara Jody Saraceno is a laser scientist whose research involves the development of ultrafast lasers, a technology whose applications include ultrafast laser spectroscopy, and imaging biological processes at the molecular scale. Born in Argentina and educated in France and Switzerland, she works in Germany as a professor in the Faculty for Electrical Engineering of Ruhr University Bochum, where she holds the Chair of Photonics and Ultrafast Laser Science.
