Student of the Year

2010 David Haefner
"Spin Transfer and Power Flow at Subwavelength Scales": Angular momentum is exchanged when an electromagnetic wave encounters a scattering medium. We dem-onstrate that the spin-orbit interaction in scattering from a spherically symmetric potentials results in a spiral flow of energy in the near-field and intermediate zones. We will show how such a power flow can be observed and will discuss some consequences for field mediated interactions at subwavelength scales. As an, we will discuss the emergence of a new kind of "optical matter" where nonconservative forces and torques determine kinematic properties, which are strongly coupled to the polarization state of the exciting radiation. (see event announcement).

2009 Oleksandr Savchyn
"Sensitizers of erbium in silicon-rich SiO2: nanocrystals or luminescence centers?": The implementation of silicon photonics requires the development of a compact silicon-compatible light source. One of the possible routes for its realization is to use the emission from optical centers incorporated into silicon-based matrices and sensitized with dopants. It has long been thought that silicon nanocrystals can be used as efficient and dominant sensitizers of erbium in silicon-doped SiO2. In the current presentation it will be shown that the indirect excitation of erbium in this material does not require the presence of silicon nanocrystals. This conclusion clarifies a number of previously unexplained results and opens new opportunities in the field of silicon photonics (see event announcement).

2008 Georgios A. Siviloglou
"Observation of Accelerating Airy Beams": We report the first observation of Airy optical beams. This intriguing class of wave packets, initially predicted by Berry and Balazs in 1979, has been realized in both one- and two-dimensional configurations. As demonstrated in our experiments, these Airy beams can remain diffraction-free over long distances while they tend to freely accelerate during propagation (see event announcement).

2007 Ying Zhou
"High performance cholesteric liquid crystal lasers" (see event announcement).

2006 Erwan Baleine
"Surface pinning effect of polymer-dispersed liquid crystal and its applications" (see event announcement).

2005 Jeremy D. Ellis

2004 Anne Janet Milliez

2003 Michael Mielke

2002 Gabriel Popescu & Sergey Polyakov

2001 Irina Puscasu