Donna Cunningham 802-482-3748 [email protected]

Steve Eisenberg 908-582-7474 [email protected]

BELL LABS SCIENTISTS HIGHLIGHT IMPACT OF PHYSICS ON COMMUNICATIONS AT WORLD'S LARGEST PHYSICS MEETING

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ATLANTA -The largest physics meeting in history, taking place here all this week, features talks by four scientists from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, highlighting the impact of physics on communications.

Bill Brinkman, James Gordon, Wayne Knox and Federico Capasso will address the 100th anniversary meeting of the American Physical Society, which is expected to draw 10,000 physicists to the Georgia World Congress Center.

"Four eras of major change in communications technology can be traced to the corresponding major discoveries of physics that directly influenced the communications industry: electromagnetism, the electron, quantum mechanics and quantum optics," says Brinkman, Bell Labs Physical Sciences and Engineering Research Division vice president.

He elaborated on all four in his talk, Physics and Communications - An Affair That Has Lasted for Two Centuries. "A close relationship between fundamental work in physics and telecommunications was established very early on, and it continues to this day," says Brinkman. "Today's work toward an optical network involves some of the most basic concepts of physics, nonlinear interactions, solitons, amplifiers and many fundamental materials problems."

"Lasers in Telecommunications," was covered by Gordon, in a symposium covering the impact of the laser on contemporary physics. "Lasers, sources of coherent light, have changed the way we think about optics," says Gordon, consultant to the Bell Labs Photonics Research Lab. "Starting from 'a solution looking for a problem,' they have, among other things, created revolutionary changes in telecommunications."

He discussed how this came about, from Einstein's 1917 revelation that induced emission must be directional, to what is happening today.

Knox, head of the Bell Labs Advanced Photonics Research department, discussed how ultrafast physics in semiconductors has moved from an area of fundamental research to new products over the past two decades, in a symposium on the applications of lasers and "new physics."

"In the early 1980s, there were many fundamental studies of carrier and phonon dynamics, nonlinear optics, and transport in semiconductors on the femtosecond time scale," says Knox. "As we approach the year 2000, new commercial products are emerging based on those fundamental studies."

"Quantum Technology, A Bird's-Eye View of its Evolution from the Forties to the 21st Century," will be presented by Capasso, head of the Bell Labs Semiconductor Physics Research department, on Thursday. He will analyze various commercial products used in optical communications and networking today, dissecting them and explaining the quantum physics behind them, and he will discuss key milestones and trends in photonics and electronics as well as the profound influence of quantum mechanics on them.

Such milestones include the scaling of silicon technology following Moore's curve and its limits, the emergence of gallium-arsenide- and indium-phosphide-based compound semiconductor devices for optical-fiber communications and high-speed/low-noise electronics, "materials by design" with tailored electronic and optical properties, made possible by the invention of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and other epitaxial growth techniques.

Commercial devices based on quantum phenomena in low-dimensional systems (such as quantum-well lasers and modulators and high-electron-mobility transistors) are being used in telecommunications, high-capacity optical networks, and consumer electronics.

"The invention of quantum-cascade lasers, quantum-well infrared detectors, plastic LEDs and transistors, and blue nitride-based lasers has created exciting opportunities in areas like chemical sensing, infrared imaging, lightweight displays, high-density data storage, and high-resolution laser printers," says Capasso. He speculates that recent advances in molecular electronics (carbon nanotubes, electron transport in single molecules, and the manipulation of single atoms and molecules) could shape electronics and photonics in the next century.

More than a hundred Bell Labs technical talks are being presented at the APS centennial meeting, on topics ranging from organic crystal lasers and quantum-cascade lasers to DNA computing and nanomolding.

Bell Labs is the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies. The company, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., designs, builds and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, consumer and business telephone systems and microelectronics components. Further information is available at http://www.lucent.com.

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