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LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES' SCIENTIST FEDERICO CAPASSO RECEIVES IEEE/LEOS WILLIAM STREIFER AWARD FOR SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT
For Release: TUESDAY, DEC. 1, 1998
ORLANDO, FLA. -- The IEEE/Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) today awarded its 1998 William Streifer Award for Scientific Achievement to Federico Capasso and Jerome Faist for "the design, demonstration and pioneering development of the quantum cascade laser, which is revolutionizing the field of mid-infrared semiconductor lasers."
The award was a highlight of LEOS '98, the organization's eleventh annual meeting, here through Friday.
Capasso, head of the Semiconductor Physics Research Department of Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, and Faist, now a professor at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, invented the quantum cascade (QC) laser at Bell Labs in 1994.
The QC laser has been hailed as a revolutionary light source because it is the first laser in which the wavelength is determined by the thickness of the active materials rather than by their chemical composition. The wavelength can be pre-selected anywhere in the mid- and long-wavelength infrared regions. This is the broad, invisible range of the spectrum in which sensors work and where most gases and vapors leave telltale light-absorption fingerprints.
The QC laser, therefore, has potential commercial applications in such areas as pollution monitoring, industrial process control, auto emission diagnostics, and medical testing. In pulsed mode, it works at room temperature and above and is hundreds of times more powerful than conventional semiconductor lasers operating at the same wavelength.
Capasso and his Bell Labs colleagues have recently used QC lasers to detect extremely small amounts -- fewer than 100 parts per billion -- of trace chemicals, opening the door to a new class of extremely sensitive, compact and portable chemical sensors.
Unlike conventional lasers, it operates like an electronic waterfall: When an electric current flows through it, electrons cascade down an energy staircase with tens of steps; every time they hit a step they emit a laser photon, or light pulse. So each electron generates tens of photons, as many as the number of steps, rather than a single photon as in conventional semiconductor lasers. This cascade effect is responsible for the high power of QC lasers.
Capasso is internationally recognized for his basic and applied research on atomically engineered, man-made, semiconductor materials and devices. His work has opened up new areas of investigation in semiconductor science, mesoscopic physics, nonlinear optics, electronics and photonics.
He joined Bell Labs in 1972 and has co-authored more than 200 papers, edited four books, given more than 100 invited talks at technical conferences and holds 30 U.S. patents and 45 foreign patents. He holds a Ph.D in physics from the University of Rome, Italy. He is a member of the editorial boards of Applied Physics Letters, Semiconductor Science and Technology and Il Nuovo Cimento.
Capasso has been widely honored for his pioneering research. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of the John Price Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Technology and Innovation Award from Industry Week Magazine, the Materials Research Society Medal, the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the LMVH "Vinci of Excellence" Prize, the Heinrich Welker Memorial Medal from Siemens, the Popular Science Award for Science and Technology, the New York Academy of Sciences Award, the IEEE David Sarnoff Award in Electronics, the Bell Labs Distinguished Member of Technical Staff and Bell Labs Fellows Awards, the Award of Excellence of the Society for Technical Communications, and the Premio Capitolium Award from the City of Rome.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and SPIE.
Lucent Technologies designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, consumer and business telephone systems and microelectronics components. More information about Lucent Technologies is available on the worldwide web at http://www.lucent.com.
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