OSA News

Laser Physicist Claire Gmachl Receives MacArthur Fellowship  

September 20, 2005 (Washington, DC)--Claire Gmachl has received a MacArthur Fellowship for her work as a laser physicist. The MacArthur Foundation gives each Fellow a $500,000 stipend over five years. Gmachl is an experimental scientist working at the intersection of technology and fundamental physics in the fields of optics and semiconductor laser technology. She is also a member of the Optical Society of America.

A wizard at imagining and creating new designs for solid-state lasers, Gmachl's pioneering work has led to critical advances in the development of Quantum Cascade (QC) lasers. QC lasers are a rapidly evolving class of high-performing, mid-infrared, semiconductor light sources. The lasers designed by Gmachl and her colleagues are noteworthy for their considerable wavelength tunability, high-power operation, high-speed modulation capabilities, and seemingly unlimited design potential. She has demonstrated the versatility and promise of mid-infrared light sources for a wide range of applications, including trace gas sensing in the environmental, industrial, and medical fields, and free-space optics in wireless communications.

Her other recent achievements include the development of new hybrid devices, which include quantum cascade structures and nonlinear components, dramatically extending the wavelength range of QC technology. These designs have direct applications to environmental monitoring, clinical diagnoses, spectroscopy, and chemical process control. With her combination of technological flair and deep understanding of physical concepts, Gmachl translates complex principles into original and practical devices that advance our understanding of optical device designs and promise to address a wide variety of engineering challenges.

Gmachl received an M.S. (1991) from the University of Innsbruck and a Ph.D. (1995) from the Technical University of Vienna. She has been a member of the technical staff (1992-94) at the Technical University of Munich and an assistant professor (1995-96) at the Technical University of Vienna. The majority of her work on QC lasers was done as a member of the technical staff (1996-2003) at Lucent Technologies-Bell Laboratories. Gmachl is currently an associate professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University.

For more information and a full list of MacArthur Fellows, please visit http://www.macfound.org/programs/fel/announce.htm

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