Julius Springer Award 2015 Goes to Harvard’s Mikhail Lukin

23 October, 2015—The academic publisher Springer Nature announced this week the recipient of the 2015 Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics, which recognizes researchers with outstanding and innovative contributions to the field of applied physics. OSA Fellow Mikhail Lukin, professor of physics at Harvard University (USA) will receive the award for his ground-breaking work in quantum optics and nanophotonics. The award and an associated cash prize of US$5,000 will be presented 21 October, 2015, at the Magnus-Haus in Berlin, Germany, where Lukin will give a public lecture on his work.
 
Lukin’s pioneering research involves the control of single photons and individual atoms in dynamic quantum systems, which has given rise to new physical phenomena and added to the fields of quantum information science and nonlinear optics. In 2013 alone, Lukin published papers on the characteristics of solid-state spin qubits, nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, single-photon all-optical switches and transistors, remote quantum registers, the spin-squeezing of entangled atoms and magnetic imaging, among others. His career also has involved key research in quantum plasmonics and quantum optical switches.
 
Lukin began his career in Russia at the Moscow Institute of Technology and Physics. He received his PhD at Texas A&M University in 1998. He then worked as a post-doc at Harvard’s Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics before joining the physics faculty in 2001. His name is on over 300 academic papers and numerous distinguished awards.
 
Since 1998, the editors-in-chief of the Springer journals Applied Physics A – Materials Science and Processing and Applied Physics B – Lasers and Optics have chosen the annual recipient of the Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics. Previous winners in the photonics field have included Sir John Pendry in 2013 for his work in superlenses and invisibility cloaking, Ferenc Krausz in 2003 for pioneering work in attosecond light pulses, and Shuji Nakamura in 1999 for the invention of the blue laser diode.