Two Students Receive Newport Award in Photonics
PRISM announces the 2008 Undergraduate and Graduate 2008 Newport Awards for Photonics. The awards will be given to Thomas Lipp ’08, a senior in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Anthony Hoffman, a graduate student in Electrical Engineering.
Thomas Lipp worked in the group of Prof. Craig Arnold helping to develop a new adaptive lens technology that is three orders of magnitude faster than competing approaches. His thesis was entitled “Design and Fabrication of Tunable Acoustic Gradient Index of Refraction Lenses.” Through Thomas' efforts in both design and research, the group has been able to move the technology from a clunky laboratory fixture to a sleek device that can be directly integrated with traditional optical components. The depth and quality of his work is evident not only through a clear and complete thesis, but through a first author conference proceedings paper on the subject to appear later this summer. The research field will most definitely be referring to Thomas' thesis for some time to come in the future in this important area.
Anthony J. Hoffman, whose thesis is being performed under the supervision of Prof. Claire 
Gmachl, works in the field of mid-infrared materials and devices, especially in the areas of metamaterials and quantum cascade lasers. These are both areas in which nanostructures extend the performance of materials for light generation and transport to performance regimes long thought not to be possible. A trademark of his work is the combination of meticulous experiments and intellectual fearlessness. For example, he recently published a landmark paper in which he and co-workers demonstrated a three-dimensional all-semiconductor metamaterial that exhibits negative refraction for all incidence angles in the long-wave infrared region. In the area of quantum cascade lasers, he improved their energy efficiency through heterogeneous injectors to improve the band energy alignments in the structure. Anthony’s work will influence future designs of optical semiconductor devices ranging from medical to environmental to solar energy applications.