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.
Federico Capasso is an Italian-American 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.
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.
The IEEE Photonics Award is a Technical Field Award established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 2002. This award is presented for outstanding achievements in photonics, including work relating to: light-generation, transmission, deflection, amplification and detection and the optical/electro-optical componentry and instrumentation used to accomplish these functions. Also included are storage technologies utilizing photonics to read or write data and optical display technologies. It also extends from energy generation/propagation, communications, information processing, storage and display, biomedical and medical uses of light and measurement applications.
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.
Anne Geneviève L'Huillier is a French physicist. She is a professor of atomic physics at Lund University in Sweden.
The Charles Hard Townes Award of Optica is a prize for quantum electronics, including laser physics. Awarded annually since 1981, it is named after the Nobel Prize-winning laser pioneer Charles H. Townes.
Albert Stolow is a Canadian physicist. He is the Canada Research Chair in Molecular Photonics, full professor of chemistry & biomolecular sciences and of physics, and a member of the Ottawa Institute for Systems Biology at the University of Ottawa. He is the founder and an ongoing member of the Molecular Photonics Group at the National Research Council of Canada. He is adjunct professor of Chemistry and of Physics at Queen's University in Kingston, and a Graduate Faculty Scholar in the department of physics, University of Central Florida and a Fellow of the Max-Planck-uOttawa Centre for Extreme and Quantum Photonics. In 2008, he was elected a Fellow in the American Physical Society, nominated by its Division of Chemical Physics in 2008, for contributions to ultrafast laser science as applied to molecular physics, including time-resolved studies of non-adiabatic dynamics in excited molecules, non-perturbative quantum control of molecular dynamics, and dynamics of polyatomic molecules in strong laser fields. In 2008, Stolow won the Keith Laidler Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry, for a distinguished contribution to the field of physical chemistry, recognizing early career achievement. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America for the application of ultrafast optical techniques to molecular dynamics and control, in particular, studies of molecules in strong laser fields and the development of new methods of optical quantum control. In 2013, he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (Canada). In 2017, Stolow was awarded the Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics of the American Physical Society for the development of methods for probing and controlling ultrafast dynamics in polyatomic molecules, including time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy and imaging, strong field molecular ionization, and dynamic Stark quantum control. In 2018, Stolow was awarded the John C. Polanyi Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry “for excellence by a scientist carrying out research in Canada in physical, theoretical or computational chemistry or chemical physics”. In 2020, he became Chair of the Division of Chemical Physics of the American Physical Society. His group's research interests include ultrafast molecular dynamics and quantum control, time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy and imaging, strong field & attosecond physics of polyatomic molecules, and coherent non-linear optical microscopy of live cells/tissues, materials and geological samples. In 2020, Stolow launched a major new high power ultrafast laser facility at the University of Ottawa producing high energy, phase-controlled few-cycle pulses of 2 micron wavelength at 10 kHz repetition rate. These are used for High Harmonic Generation to produce bright ultrafast Soft X-ray pulses for a new Ultrafast Xray Science Laboratory.
Uwe Paul Erich Thumm is a German-American physicist with research interests in atomic, molecular, and optical physics and nanoscience. A distinguished physics professor at Kansas State University and the J. R. Macdonald Laboratory in Manhattan, Kansas his research team investigates the ultrafast dynamics of electrons and molecular fragments in laser-matter and particle-matter interactions, highly-charged-ion physics, electron–atom collisions, and plasmonic nanostructures. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and recipient of several awards, including the Senior Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Donna Theo Strickland is a Canadian optical physicist and pioneer in the field of pulsed lasers. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, together with Gérard Mourou, for the practical implementation of chirped pulse amplification. She is a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Helen H. Fielding is a Professor of physical chemistry at University College London (UCL). She focuses on ultrafast transient spectroscopy of protein chromophores and molecules. She was the first woman to win the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize (1996) and Marlow Award (2001).
Semiconductor saturable-absorber mirrors (SESAMs) are a type of saturable absorber used in mode locking lasers.
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.
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.
Randy Alan Bartels is an American investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research and a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has been awarded the Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship in physics, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE). In 2020 and 2022, he received support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to develop microscope technologies for imaging tissues and cells.
Jennifer E. Hastie is a British physicist specialising in the design of lasers, including Raman lasers based on synthetic diamond crystals, and vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting-lasers. She is a professor of physics at the University of Strathclyde, where she directs the Institute of Photonics.
Natalie Renuka Banerji is a Swiss chemist and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Bern. She studies organic and hybrid materials using ultrafast spectroscopies. She was awarded the 2015 Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize.
