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05 Feb 2004
The inventor of the thin disk laser will be honored at next week’s 2004 Rank prize award ceremony.
• Adolf Giesen of the University of Stuttgart, Germany has been awarded £30 000 ($55 000) in recognition of his invention of the thin disk laser. The key feature of the design, which Giesen patented in 1996, is that the laser crystal is cut into a thin disc about the size a small coin so that it can be cooled more easily. One side of the disk is bonded to a metal cooling finger while the other is pumped by a semiconductor laser.
This design eliminates the problem of thermal defocusing that plagues conventional solid state lasers as their output power rises. Beams from thin disk lasers can be focused to spot sizes close to the theoretical limit imposed by diffraction. To date, versions emitting in excess of 1.5 kW of continuous power have been demonstrated.
• Ronald Kröger and his collaborators have been recognized for solving the mystery as to why fish have excellent color vision. It has been known for sometime that fish are equipped with lenses that are corrected for spherical aberration but it was thought that these should suffer severe chromatic aberration. In 1999, Kröger’s team discovered that fish lenses use a carefully designed refractive index gradient to focus blue, red and green light to a common location. The result is a combined set of in-focus images and thus perfect color vision.
Kröger is based at Lund University in Sweden. His collaborators are Melanie Campbell from the University of Waterloo, Canada; Russell Fernald from Stanford University, US; and Hans-Joachim Wagner from Tübingen University, Germany. Kröger has been awarded £20 000, while his collaborators have each received £10 000.
• Dennis Pacey, of the University of Washington, Seattle, US and his collaborators Barry Lee of the State University of New York and Joel Pokorny and Vivianne Smith of the University of Chicago have been honored for their pioneering studies of human vision.
The team use microscopy to study fresh human retinas in vitro in order to study the role that different retinal cells play in transmitting images from the eye to the brain. Pacey and colleagues introduce a microelectrode into a chosen cell, record its response to modulated light and then inject dye to label the cell according to its function. The work has led to the recent discovery of a new type of ganglion cell that is thought to control our body clock (circadian rhythm). Pacey receives £20,000, while each of his collaborators receives £10 000.
The Rank prizes are awarded every two years in the fields of optoelectronics and nutrition. This year’s awards will be presented on 9 February at the Royal College of Physicians, London, UK.
Author
Siân Harris is features editor of Opto & Laser Europe
magazine.
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