Unifying physics and technology in light of Maxwell's equations

Professor Sir David Payne CBE FREng FRS, University of Southampton, UK

Professor Sir David Neil Payne CBE FRS FREng is Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, UK. His work has had a great impact on telecommunications and laser technology over the last forty years. The vast transmission capacity of today's internet results directly from the erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA) invented by David and his team in the 1980s. His pioneering work in fibre fabrication in the 70s resulted in almost all of the special fibres in use today including fibre lasers.

With US funding, he led the team that broke the kilowatt barrier for fibre laser output to international acclaim and now holds many other fibre laser performance records. He has published over 650 Conference and Journal papers.

As an entrepreneur, David's activities have led to a cluster of 11 photonics spin out companies in and around Southampton. He founded SPI Lasers PLC, which was acquired by the Trumpf Corporation of Germany. He is an Emeritus Chairman of the Marconi Society and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Engineering. David is a fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Professor Frederico Capasso, Harvard University, USA

Federico Capasso is the Robert Wallace Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University, which he joined in 2003 after 27 years at Bell Labs where he was Member of Technical Staff, Department Head and Vice President for Physical Research. He pioneered band-structure engineering of semiconductor nanostructures and quantum devices, including the invention and realization of the quantum cascade laser and reported the first measurement of the repulsive Casimir force. In the last decade he has focused on wavefront control using plasmonics and on a new approach to diffractive optics based on metasurfaces, known as flat optics. Key results of this research include the formulation and demonstration of the generalized laws of refraction and reflection and aberration free flat lenses. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei. His awards include the IEEE Sarnoff Award, the Materials Research Society Medal, the Franklin Institute Wetherill Medal, the Rank Prize in Optoelectronics, the Optical Society Wood Prize, the IEEE Edison Medal, the American Physical Society Arthur Schawlow Prize in Laser Science, the King Faisal Prize, the Berthold Leibinger Zukunft Prize, the Julius Springer Prize in Applied Physics, the Institute of Physics Duddell Medal, the Jan Czochralski Award for lifetime achievements in Materials Science, the European Physical Society Quantum Electronics Prize, the SPIE Gold Medal and the Gold Medal of the President of Italy for meritorious achievement in science. He holds honorary doctorates from Lund University, Diderot University and the Universities of Bologna and Roma II (Tor Vergata).

Professor Thomas Ebbesen, University of Strasbourg and CNRS, France

Thomas W. Ebbesen was born in Oslo, Norway. He received his bachelor degree from Oberlin College, Ohio, and his PhD from the Curie University in Paris. Ebbesen then worked both in academic and corporate research institutions, such as the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratory (Tsukuba) and NEC Research Institute (Princeton), before returning to France in 1999 to help build a new laboratory at the University of Strasbourg, ISIS, which he headed from 2005 to 2012. He is currently the director of the International Center for Frontier Research in Chemistry and the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study.  He holds the chair of physical chemistry of light-matter interactions. Ebbesen has received many awards for his pioneering research, including the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience for his transformative contribution to the field of nano-optics.  He has been elected to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the French Academy of Science.

Sir John Pendry FRS, Imperial College London, UK

John Pendry was born in the UK in 1943. He studied physics at Cambridge University and after a year working at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey he moved to the UK synchrotron radiation source at Daresbury to head the theory group before moving on to his present position at Imperial College London in 1981. Pendry’s early research was in surface science, and later on the theory of waves in disordered systems. Now his main interests lie in optics and electromagnetism where he invented a new class of materials, metamaterials, whose properties derive more from their internal structure than from their chemistry, leading to the first realisation of a negative refractive index. He showed that these materials could be used to break the notorious diffraction limit which postulates that light cannot see anything smaller than its wavelength, typically about a millionth of a metre. The new lens is theoretically perfect limited only by how accurately it is manufactured and has stimulated many experiments designed to squeeze light down to nanometre dimensions.

Sir Peter Knight FRS, Imperial College London, UK

Peter Knight is Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College and Senior Fellow in Residence at The Royal Society’s Chicheley Hall and a past President of the Institute of Physics. He retired in 2010 as Deputy Rector (Research) at Imperial. He was knighted in 2005 for his work in optical physics. Peter Knight was the 2004 President of the Optical Society of America. He is Editor of Contemporary Physics, a member of the UK Quantum Technology Initiative Strategy Advisory Board, chairs the Quantum Metrology Institute at the National Physical Laboratory, was until 2010 chair of the UK Defence Scientific Advisory Council and remains a UK Government science advisor. His research centres on quantum optics and quantum technology. He has won the Thomas Young Medal and the Glazebrook Medal of the Institute of Physics, the Ives Medal of the OSA and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. He is a Council Member at Sussex University.

Professor Ian Walmsley FRS, Imperial College London, UK

Ian Walmsley is Provost of Imperial College London, UK, and Chair in Experimental Physics. His research in optical science and technology ranges from ultrafast optics to quantum information science. Currently he is the Director of the Networked Quantum Information Technology Hub, the largest collaboration in the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Optical Society (OSA), the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics.

Professor Mikhail Lukin, Harvard University, USA

Mikhail Lukin received the Ph.D. degree from Texas A&M University in 1998. He has been on a faculty of Harvard Physics Department since 2001, where he is currently George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, and a co-Director of Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms and of Harvard Quantum Initiative in Science and Engineering. His research interests include quantum optics, quantum control of atomic and nanoscale solid-state systems, quantum metrology, nanophotonics, and quantum information science. He has co-authored over 400 technical papers and has received a number of awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, NSF Career Award, Adolph Lomb Medal of the Optical Society of America, AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, APS I.I.Rabi Prize, Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics, and the Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics. He is a fellow of the OSA, APS, and AAAS and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Professor Ruth Oulton, University of Bristol, UK

Ruth Oulton’s field of research involves the study of nanoscale semiconductor devices that enable the exchange of “quantum” information between a single electron and a single photon.  The idea is that they can use the rules of quantum mechanics to perform computing and measurements in a completely new way.  She take ideas from quantum theory and information science, bring them together with what we are beginning to understand about semiconductors on the nanoscale, and to make working quantum devices that engineers will use as part of their everyday toolkit.  In her recent work she studies single electron spins in atomic-like systems, and studies how the angular momentum of the photon and spin exchange information, and how photonic design can influence this.  In other interdisciplinary side projects she studies the role of photonic structures in plants such as seaweed and begonias.