RW Wood Prize
The RW Wood Prize has been awarded annually since 1975 for optics by the Optical Society of America . It is named after Robert Williams Wood .
Award winners
| year | Surname | Justification of the price |
|---|---|---|
| 1975 | Juris Upatnieks , Emmett Leith | for contributions to holography , especially for the demonstration of the improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio in off-axis holography |
| 1976 | Theodore Maiman | for the development of the first laser . |
| 1977 | Peter Fellgett | for discovering the multiplex advantage that led to the renaissance of Fourier transform spectroscopy |
| 1978 | Peter Sorokin | for the invention of the dye laser |
| 1979 | Peter Franconia | for fundamental discoveries of 2nd optical harmonic generation, optical mixing and optical rectification |
| 1980 | Anthony E. Siegman | for the discovery, analysis and development of the unstable optical resonator, which was subsequently used in many high-power lasers |
| 1981 | Erich P. Ippen , Charles V. Shank | for the development of optical sub-picosecond spectroscopy and generation of ultra-short laser pulses with mode locking techniques, with application to the investigation of ultra-short phenomena (such as semiconductors, relaxation in large molecules, hemoglobin, bacterial rhodopsin) |
| 1982 | Linn F. Mollenauer | for the development of the color center laser |
| 1983 | Sven R. Hartmann | for the discovery of the photon echo in laser spectroscopy |
| 1984 | Otto Wichterle | for his contributions to the development of soft contact lenses |
| 1985 | David H. Auston | for the development of optical electronics in the picosecond range, especially the Picosecond Optoelectronic Photoconductive Switch |
| 1986 | Joseph A. Giordmaine , Robert C. Miller | for the development of the optical parametric oscillator |
| 1987 | David E. Aspnes | for the development of optical ellipsometry as a means of characterizing materials |
| 1988 | Daniel S. Chemla , David AB Miller | for contributions to the understanding of electro-optical and non-linear optical properties of finite quantum semiconductor structures |
| 1989 | Daniel R. Grischkowsky | for research into the propagation of optical pulses and especially the use of glass fibers to generate short laser pulses |
| 1990 | Rogers H. Stolen | for contributions to polarization control and nonlinear optics in glass fibers |
| 1991 | Thomas F. Deutsch , Daniel J. Ehrlich , Richard M. Osgood Jr. | for the development of photochemical deposition with lasers and the application of laser-induced photochemical reactions in material processing |
| 1992 | Yuri Nikolayevich Denisjuk | for the invention of the Bragg hologram and other contributions to holography |
| 1993 | Joseph E. Geusic , LG Van Uitert | for the invention of the neodymium-YAG laser and the demonstration of the practical usefulness of this solid-state laser |
| 1994 | Dana Z. Anderson | for pioneering work on photorefractive materials in ring resonators |
| 1995 | Gérard Mourou | for contributions to ultra-fast laser optics and especially the introduction of the concept of chirped pulse amplification for amplifying laser pulses |
| 1996 | Eli Yablonovitch | for the proposal of photonic crystals and engineering design based on electromagnetic properties of the band structure |
| 1997 | Peter Moulton | for titanium: sapphire laser in the near infrared which enabled a new era of tunable solid-state lasers and ultra-short laser pulses based solely on solid-state lasers |
| 1998 | Martin Fejer , Robert Byer | for fundamental contributions to quasi phase matching and its application in nonlinear optics |
| 1999 | Eric A. Cornell , Carl Wieman | for the development of laser cooling of atoms and their application in the first generation of a Bose-Einstein condensate in an atomic gas |
| 2000 | Marvin Minsky , Paul Davidovits , David Egger | for fundamental contributions to confocal microscopy |
| 2001 | Federico Capasso | for the development of the quantum cascade laser, which revolutionized the field of infrared lasers |
| 2002 | Pierre Meystre | for fundamental contributions to the free electron laser, cavity quantum electrodynamics and the micromaser and the establishment of the field of nonlinear atomic optics |
| 2003 | George Ian Stegeman | for fundamental contributions to nonlinear integrated optics |
| 2004 | Rangaswamy Srinivasan , James J. Wynne , Samuel E. Blum | for the development of gentle laser surgery with pulsed lasers in the ultraviolet |
| 2005 | Masataka Nakazawa | for the development of the erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) pumped with laser diodes and its application to high-speed optical communication and short laser pulses |
| 2006 | Louis E. Brus , Aleksey Ekimov , Alexander L. Efros | for the discovery of nanocrystalline quantum dots and pioneering work on their electronic and optical properties |
| 2007 | Bahram Jalali | for the development and demonstration of silicon-based Raman lasers |
| 2008 | Jonathan P. Heritage , Andrew M. Weiner | for the development of programmable optical pulse shaping and its application to ultra-fast optics and photonics |
| 2009 | Paul G. Kwiat | for the development of sources for polarization-entangled photons which enabled significant advances in basic research on quantum mechanics and quantum information theory (quantum cryptography, dense coding, quantum teleportation and optical quantum computers) |
| 2010 | Henry C. Kapteyn , Margaret M. Murnane | for advances in the generation of higher harmonics with application to the generation of ultra-short laser pulses in the sub-femtosecond range and the attosecond physics involved |
| 2011 | Demetrios N. Christodoulides | for contributions to nonlinear and linear beam optics which opened up new research fields, including the discovery of optical discrete solitons, Bragg and vector solitons in glass fibers, nonlinear surface waves and the discovery of self-accelerating optical Airy rays |
| 2012 | Mansoor Sheik-Bahae , Eric Van Stryland | for the development of Z-Scan, a simple and effective method to measure optical nonlinearities of cubic and higher order |
| 2013 | Milton Feng | for contributions to the invention and implementation of the transistor laser, which simultaneously sends an electrical signal and a laser signal and forms the basis for revolutionary new integrated circuits with electronic and photonic elements |
| 2014 | Michael Bass | for the discovery of optical rectification which led to the development of high bandwidth terahertz sources |
| 2015 | Naomi J. Halas , Peter J. Nordlander | for the introduction of nanoparticles with tunable optical resonances and the concept of plasmon hybridization to explain their properties. They revolutionized the understanding of the optical properties of metallic nanostructures |
| 2016 | Kishan Dholakia | for pioneering work in optical micromanipulation with “shaped light” for interdisciplinary photonics-based applications |
| 2017 | Michal Lipson | for groundbreaking research on silicon photonics |
| 2018 | Christopher Peter James Barty | for fundamental new developments that made ultra-fast and high-energy lasers possible worldwide |
| 2019 | Jian-Wei Pan | for pioneering experimental research at the limit of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and optical implementations of quantum information, including quantum non-locality, quantum key distribution and optical quantum computing |
| 2020 | John M. Dudley | for the elucidation of fundamental aspects of the generation of supercontinuum through careful study of phase stability and for opening the way to compact supercontinuum sources for numerous applications. |
Web links
- official website of the award at the Optical Society of America (osa.org)