Delfyett, a UCF Pegasus Professor of optics and photonics, studies the application of semiconductor lasers to fiber optic communications — the key component of programs like FaceTime and Zoom.

“It is the backbone of the internet,” says Delfyett, who joined the UCF College of Optics and Photonics in 1993. “This is a very relevant time to receive this award as we are all very dependent on these applications during the pandemic.”

Each year, the American Physical Society selects one scientist who has made outstanding contributions in laser science research to receive a cash prize and certificate of cited contributions to the field. The award is named after Schawlow, a Nobel laureate and co-creator of the laser.

“I was shocked when I first heard that I received the award and then immediately humbled,” says Delfyett. “To be recognized by your scientific peers that aren’t only peers, but competition as well
to me that is the highest achievement possible.”

Delfyett is a graduate of The City College of New York and the șŁœÇֱȄ of Rochester; his doctoral research focused on ultrafast spectroscopy. His technical achievements at UCF include producing semiconductor diode-based lasers that produced the world’s shortest pulses from a laser diode; produced the world’s highest power from a laser; generated the most data from a single laser diode; and generated an optical timing signal that is the most accurate ever generated from a laser diode.

Currently, Delfyett is working toward the next stage in electronic transistors. The number of transistors on a chip continues to double every two years — an observation called Moore’s Law — but physicists generally agree the theoretical end point of these shrinking transistors is coming soon. Delfyett is convinced there is a way to transcend the current barrier. His lab’s goal is to combine photons and electrons to continue increasing the processing speed of electronics.

Their target: photo-electronic circuitry that can process about 1 million Netflix channels on a semiconductor chip about the size of a fingernail. This would have immediate applications in data centers throughout the world.

Delfyett will receive $10,000 with this current award to celebrate his contributions to the field of physical sciences.

“Science gives to me a feeling of inspiration that I hope to instill on my students,” says Delfyett. “By engaging in science, you have the opportunity to discover things that have never been discovered before, and that is what motivates me to keep on with my research.”

Soileau, who oversees the office responsible for taking research from UCF labs into industry, is also an accomplished scientist, researcher and professor. It was his innovative research in the advancement of high-energy laser optics that earned him this recognition.

His pioneering work has been recognized multiple times by a variety of organizations, from the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, where he was elected a fellow in 2007, to the National Academy of Inventors, which named him a fellow in 2013. He is a fellow of The Optical Society (OSA) and he earned a gold medal from SPIE and OSA’s Esther Hoffman Beller award.

Soileau was the first director of UCF’s internationally recognized Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL). In 1999, he was named vice president for Research and Commercialization. The office also provides contract and grant services for UCF faculty. Under Soileau’s leadership, research funding increased from $36.6 million in 1998 to an accumulated $1.2 billion since 2000.

Just as important, under Soileau’s leadership UCF has made its mark commercializing technology, stimulating the local economy, and helping to establish a strong concentration of companies in optics and lasers, simulation and training, computer science, alternative energy and biomedical sciences.

Even as he worked to help position UCF for success, Soileau continued to conduct his own work in the area of nonlinear optical properties of materials and lasers. He holds patents for optics devices that have contributed to the advancement of high-energy laser optics.

Soileau, a Louisiana sharecropper’s son who hoed cotton to pay for college, received his Ph.D. in quantum electronics from the șŁœÇֱȄ of Southern California and is a distinguished professor of optics, electrical and computer engineering and physics. He announced last year he would step down from his position in the Office of Research and Commercialization this year, but will continue to serve as a professor.

Seven inventors, including Nobel laureate Andrew Schally, are part of the 2016 inductees into the Florida Hall of Fame. The recipients will be honored at a gala Sept. 16 in Tampa.

“We are delighted to be announcing this class of exceptional inventors whose work has greatly impacted Florida and our nation,” said Randy Berridge, who serves on the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame advisory board and as chair of the selection committee.

However, in general, these are highly selective programs leaving the vast majority of students with minimal exposure to science or engineering. Many of their exposures range from “I have to take it and I can forget it as soon as the course is over” to thinking that the subjects are painfully dull and have no relevance to their lives. Consequently, in either case, most students graduating from high school and entering college or the work force are what I call scientifically illiterate.

In college, students who are not in the sciences or engineering must take some science classes as part of the general education program requirements. Though dedicated instructors doing their best often teach these classes, the students are only motivated by the “I must take this class to graduate” requirement. The subject not only turns them off, but they very likely forget the material moments after the final is taken.

So, the majority of people in this country who will use the amazing new technologies that are being developed and who will be asked to make decisions on scientific and engineering issues (solar energy, nuclear power, fracking, energy efficiency, genetically modified plants and foods, to name a few) are scientifically illiterate.

Sometime back I was in a group discussing the problem of keeping young children interested in science. One member of the group was a very experienced elementary school educator.

I will never forget her outline of the subject matter that would hold the attention of elementary school children. She said: “Children between ages 5 and 8 will love working on dinosaurs, from 8 to 11 you can keep them interested by space (rockets, satellites, Hubble, distant planets, the Big Bang and so on) but after 11 they will discover sex and you can’t distract them from that.”

The point of this story is that to create a scientifically literate public it is necessary to identify how to get their attention and how to make the material stick with them beyond the final exam.

In the mid-1990s, together with a colleague from the philosophy department, I put together a course for The Burnett Honors College at UCF called the Culture of Science. It dealt with the who, when, where, why and how science was done – and most importantly what effects science had on society and what effects society had on science.

This course proved extraordinarily successful and was given for six semesters instead of the three in the original proposal to the college. I have since given a somewhat modified version of this course for graduate students in the UCF College of Optics & Photonics and other engineering or science departments. Notice that the course does not deal with the what of science. That already is taught very well in the existing classes in the various specialties.

Such a course places science and technology in the context of our world and deals with the impact of science. Some examples of this are the discussions I have with the students of such things as the internet or nuclear weapons or the early organized church’s problem with Galileo.

I also discuss pathological science, which is what happens when scientists become emotionally involved with a marginal or dubious phenomenon that if true would violate well-established scientific principles. If they were right, lots of money and prestigious prizes would come their way. This is called pathological science because the scientists are pathologically involved with it and cannot see their errors.

It is important that scientifically literate citizens be able to recognize this flaw. In the early 1990s, scientists in Utah thought they observed nuclear fusion in a quite standard electrolysis experiment. They dubbed it cold fusion, and if it were true it would have solved the world’s energy problems. Of course, it was not true.

I make it a point to discuss scientific ethics about being honest, doing meaningful experiments, reporting all the results and performing careful analyses. The class and I view the play “Copenhagen” to understand and discuss the pressures nuclear scientists experienced during the second World War. We also get into modern-day cosmology and this leads to discussion of the need for a God in the universe.

In my opinion, this type of course should be offered as part of the general-education program for undergraduates to satisfy their science requirements. Such courses dealing with the impacts of science and engineering just might result in more scientifically literate graduates.

Most people don’t have to know what makes an airplane fly but they should know how greatly airplanes have and will change our society. The same can be said for the internet or electric power.

Most people don’t have to know the details but they certainly should know the impacts. Their lifestyles and maybe their lives will depend on such knowledge.

Michael Bass is a professor emeritus of optics at CREOL (Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers) in UCF’s College of Optics & Photonics. He can be reached at bass@creol.ucf.edu.

I am quite sure that not many at UCF would know that about 2015, with the exception of those at CREOL (UCF’s Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers), the College of Optics & Photonics, a few in the College of Engineering & Computer Science, and some in the Science departments.

We live in a world made possible by light.

Our science and engineering of light and light technology have made it so reliable and ubiquitous that most people don’t think about how important it is.

With 2015 being the International Year of Light, events are being held around the world celebrating light and light technology. CREOL, UCF’s Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers, has emphasized it in its annual Industrial Affiliates meeting and when K-12 groups visit.

As part of this yearlong observance, I encourage everyone at UCF to be more of a player in light and promote the optics industry. The university already has shown leadership through the establishment of its College of Optics and Photonics, the first college in the nation devoted to the subjects of light and photonics. The subjects are emphasized at some other U.S. universities, but generally within traditional departments. UCF was the first to give it the prominence it needed.

Perhaps we could plan light art shows on campus and off, or maybe one or more halftime programs could be light shows?

Light and the science and engineering of light deserve recognition, and here is why:

Let’s start with the obvious. Our homes and workplaces are illuminated by artificial light sources. These have evolved from Edison’s hot tungsten filament to the much more efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs and LED lights that are now gaining wide acceptance. So when you flip the switch to turn on a light you are experiencing a modern miracle of light.

An added benefit of improved lighting efficiency is a much-reduced heat load on our air conditioners. If you picture yourself as concerned for the environment, get rid of the old bulbs and install the new types. You have a chance to be consistent and do something for the environment just by installing more efficient lighting. It is easy to do and has an immediate impact.

Another example of light technology: Just imagine life without the bar code scanner in the grocery store.

A few years back my wife and I were in Venice, Italy, and stopped to buy some items in a small store that rang up items by hand. We found what we wanted, got in line to pay, and waited behind about 40 people for nearly 35 minutes while everyone’s purchases were totaled. This proved my philosophy: “There were no good old days, just old days.”

Consider the ever-present cell phone. Its components, the electronic chips and the liquid crystal display, can only be manufactured using ultra-high precision laser and optical equipment. The LCDs in cell phones, computers, televisions and autos are optical devices; a major modern light technology you would not want to be without.

In my opinion the most overlooked contribution of light to modern life is the worldwide optical communication system. It is made possible primarily by two critical optical devices: the diode laser and the fiber optic.

In 1966, electrical engineer and physicist Charles K. Kao published a paper on the concept of light confined in optical fibers for communications that would win him the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. Kao recognized that light would provide the required spectral bandwidth and suggested how to make an optical communications system. Every time you make a telephone call or use the Internet, you can thank him.

In 1970, the Corning Company was able to make an optical fiber with low enough loss so that it could confine laser light and transmit it over long distances. Engineers at Bell Laboratories found out how to make the diode laser rugged and reliable.

The stage was set for some sort of demonstration of optical communication.

It came in 1980 when two miracles took place emanating from Lake Placid, N.Y. The setting was the Winter Olympics, and in one miracle the U.S. Men’s Hockey team defeated the Soviet Union team. The other miracle was that the television broadcasts of those Olympics were transmitted on an optical fiber communication system.

Today, there are nearly 2 billion kilometers (about 1.25 billion miles) of optical fibers in the ground or under the seas, and hundreds of millions of diode lasers generating the light that carries the information that is your voice or your Internet chatter.

We use light to do our work, to communicate, to grow our crops, to entertain us and to keep us healthy. We should pay more attention to this important aspect of the modern world.

So tonight when you open your refrigerator to get a drink, pause for a moment and toast that light that is always there to help you find what you’re looking for.

Michael Bass is a professor emeritus of optics at CREOL (Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers) in UCF’s College of Optics & Photonics. He can be reached at bass@creol.ucf.edu.

Guiding currents across specific paths in a controlled manner could allow protection against lightning strikes and high-voltage capacitor discharges, said Demetrios Christodoulides of the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL), part of UCF’s College of Optics & Photonics.

The team’s research was published today in “Science Advances.”

Using these judiciously shaped laser beams to produce electric discharges that unfold along a predefined course “can even circumvent an object that completely occludes the line of sight,” said Christodoulides, a Pegasus Professor of Optics and the Cobb Family Endowed Chair.

In some fields, electrical discharges are already used for things such as assisting the milling process, fuel ignition in combustible engines, and controlling hydrodynamics of high-speed gases, but developing ways to control and shape the path of an electrical spark has remained a challenge.

The recent introduction of “self-bending Airy beams,” a non-diffracting waveform that gives the appearance of bending as it travels, opened up the opportunities of creating curved trajectories for the electrical discharges. By manipulating the shape of the laser, it is possible to control the trail of a spark.

Christodoulides was part of the UCF team of researchers that created and observed an Airy beam for the first time in 2007. The new research published today is by Christodoulides and scientists from the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique in Montreal, San Francisco State șŁœÇֱȄ, and four other institutions in Scotland, France and China.

The program theme, “Advances in Optics & Photonics,” will feature lab tours, exhibits, short courses, technical symposiums, and a lecture by science and technology writer Jeff Hecht.

The short courses range from optical fiber communication to transition-metal solid-state lasers, and the technical symposiums cover topics such as Multimaterial Chalcogenide Fibers for Midinfrared Applications.

Hecht will present the lecture Evolving Lasers to Solve Problems at 1:50 p.m. Friday at the Student Union’s Pegasus Ballroom. His talk will describe how lasers and their applications have evolved in the past and will continue to change to benefit technology.

Hecht is a contributing editor for Laser Focus World and has written on lasers, photonics and fiber optics for more than 30 years. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology, is a senior member of the Optical Society of America and a life member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

The International Year of Light is a global initiative adopted by the United Nations to raise awareness about optical technologies and how they provide solutions to worldwide challenges in energy, education, agriculture, communications and health.

Activities at the symposium are free, but CREOL asks that participants sign up. Registration and a schedule of events can be found at .

The solution? Surround the beam with a second beam to act as an energy reservoir, sustaining the central beam to greater distances than previously possible. The secondary “dress” beam refuels and helps prevent the dissipation of the high-intensity primary beam, which on its own would break down quickly. A report on the project, “Externally refueled optical filaments,” was recently published in Nature Photonics.

Water condensation and lightning activity in clouds are linked to large amounts of static charged particles. Stimulating those particles with the right kind of laser holds the key to possibly one day summoning a shower when and where it is needed.

Lasers can already travel great distances but “when a laser beam becomes intense enough, it behaves differently than usual – it collapses inward on itself,” said Matthew Mills, a graduate student in the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL). “The collapse becomes so intense that electrons in the air’s oxygen and nitrogen are ripped off creating plasma – basically a soup of electrons.”

At that point, the plasma immediately tries to spread the beam back out, causing a struggle between the spreading and collapsing of an ultra-short laser pulse. This struggle is called filamentation, and creates a filament or “light string” that only propagates for a while until the properties of air make the beam disperse.

“Because a filament creates excited electrons in its wake as it moves, it artificially seeds the conditions necessary for rain and lightning to occur,” Mills said. Other researchers have caused “electrical events” in clouds, but not lightning strikes.

But how do you get close enough to direct the beam into the cloud without being blasted to smithereens by lightning?

“What would be nice is to have a sneaky way which allows us to produce an arbitrary long ‘filament extension cable.’ It turns out that if you wrap a large, low intensity, doughnut-like ‘dress’ beam around the filament and slowly move it inward, you can provide this arbitrary extension,” Mills said. “Since we have control over the length of a filament with our method, one could seed the conditions needed for a rainstorm from afar. Ultimately, you could artificially control the rain and lightning over a large expanse with such ideas.”

So far, Mills and fellow graduate student Ali Miri have been able to extend the pulse from 10 inches to about 7 feet. And they’re working to extend the filament even farther.

“This work could ultimately lead to ultra-long optically induced filaments or plasma channels that are otherwise impossible to establish under normal conditions,” said professor Demetrios Christodoulides, who is working with the graduate students on the project.

“In principle such dressed filaments could propagate for more than 50 meters or so, thus enabling a number of applications. This family of optical filaments may one day be used to selectively guide microwave signals along very long plasma channels, perhaps for hundreds of meters.”

Other possible uses of this technique could be used in long-distance sensors and spectrometers to identify chemical makeup. Development of the technology was supported by a $7.5 million grant from the Department of Defense.

“This counterintuitive process, which involves the concept of negative mass, mimics the behavior of a diametric drive,” said Professor Demetrios Christodoulides of UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics. “Even though ideas of this sort have been around for several years, they have never been successfully pursued because mass in nature is always a positive quantity.” Diametric drive refers to the possibility of a self-contained, space-propulsion engine that operates without the need for any external fuel.

The study “Optical diametric drive acceleration via action-reaction symmetry breaking” recently published on the website of Nature Physics and was part of a project with other partner universities. Mohammad-Ali Miri, a UCF graduate student in the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL), also participated in this work.

As everyone in introductory physics courses knows, Newton’s third law of motion states that the forces two bodies exert on each other are equal and opposite. As a result, two bodies of positive mass tend to accelerate toward each other when this pair of forces happens to be attractive.

However, if one of the two particles were to have a negative mass, this hypothetical arrangement would set up a system where the leading particle would constantly be “chased” by the trailing particle.

“Under these conditions, two interacting bodies will indefinitely accelerate in the same direction while keeping a constant distance between themselves,” the study says. “Of course, given that in real life the mass of a particle is always positive, no such acceleration behavior that breaks the action-reaction symmetry has ever been reported.”

In their experiment with the șŁœÇֱȄ of Erlangen-Nuernberg in Germany, the researchers used light pulses in a figure 8, fiber-optic platform to create the effect of attractive and repulsive forces.

“In the lab, one can create photon pulses with effective positive or negative masses,” Ali Miri said. “They [pulses] could start chasing each other until reaching relativistic limits.”

He said the concept of negative mass is not restricted to photons. Similar experiments can be performed in other settings, for example with electrons in crystalline solids.

“While a realization of a Star Trek warp drive space-propulsion engine still remains a dream, the demonstrated optical diametric drive can provide new strategies in accelerating and steering optical pulses,” Christodoulides said. “This may have an impact on how one can control light in tomorrow’s optical networks.”

The posted report can be seen by clicking .

The new bachelor of science degree in Photonics Science and Engineering will enable graduates to work for employers that create photonic or photonic-enabled products for applications in manufacturing, solar energy, smart lighting, medical diagnostics and therapeutics, telecommunications and computer technologies.

Approved earlier this year by the UCF Board of Trustees, the degree program is a joint initiative between the UCF College of Optics and Photonics (known as CREOL, which stands for the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers) and the College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS).

The degree is the only bachelor’s program in optics and photonics in Florida. Only three other institutions offer this type of undergraduate engineering degree in the nation.

The new degree also will help optics and photonics-related companies reduce the need to train new hires who are often electrical engineers but need additional skills in photonics.

Graduates skilled in photonics and engineering are in demand. Florida has 270 optics and photonics companies with 60 in Central Florida. The formation of CREOL at UCF 26 years ago has led to the birth of many of these companies, which has translated into the need for a highly trained workforce with specialized skills in optics and photonics.

“Optics is a venerable subject that has its roots in physics and astronomy, involving instruments such as telescopes and microscopes,” said Bahaa Saleh, dean of CREOL. “But photonics has emerged more recently when lasers, opto-electronics and optical fibers became available.”

The principal base of photonics is electrical engineering, a field that deals with electronics, communication, radio and microwave systems, said Michael Georgiopoulos, dean of CECS. “The partnership between the two colleges at UCF is a natural progression that represents a win-win scenario for the students and their future employers,” he said.

At UCF, the joint program will have approximately 28 faculty. “It’s a unique venture to have a collaborative program between two colleges. When the students graduate, they will be alumni of both colleges,” said Mike McKee, who will serve as associate director of the degree program.

Enrolled students will take a common set of engineering courses along with key courses in electrical engineering and specialized photonic science and engineering classes. Both colleges will provide advising for students in the early part of the program, and CREOL later will advise students taking specialized courses in photonics sciences and engineering.

Photonic science is considered an enabling technology. For example, a smart phone uses many photonics applications, such as the screen and camera. Many technology companies, although not considered primarily photonics companies, require the expertise of photonics engineers to develop their products.

According to the 2014 U.S. News and World Report Rankings of Graduate Schools, the UCF Optics graduate program and the Electrical Engineering graduate program rank 13 and 55 respectively.

Soileau served as the first director of UCF’s Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL) before being named a UCF vice president in 1998.

Lluis Torner, director of the institute, credited Soileau with supplying the necessary direction to establish a center capable of conducting cutting-edge research in optics and photonics at the highest international level. Torner said the center benefited from Soileau’s experience, specifically relating to technology transfer.

The center, which opened in 2002, gives scientists and industries around the world an opportunity to work together on research projects ranging from telecommunications and information technologies to biotechnology, sensing, quantum information, industrial photonics, nanophotonics and biophotonics.

The institute hosts six European Research Council awardees and an active Corporate Liaison Program inspired by CREOL’s Industrial Affiliates Program. ICFO has become a European center of reference for researchers and industries, and a national flagship.

Soileau has achieved similar benchmarks at UCF, which has been ranked in the top 10 nationwide for the strength of its patents four times in the past four years. In 2010, UCF celebrated a decade of research under Soileau’s tenure, which has resulted in a cumulative $1.05 billion in research funding for the university.