Optical fiber pioneer nets European accolade

17 Jun 2002

Prof. David Payne of Southampton Photonics will receive the Eduard Rhein award in recognition of his ground-breaking work on the amplification of optical signals.

Prof. David Payne, co-founder and chairman of Southampton Photonics in the UK, will receive the prestigious Basic Research Award of the Eduard Rhein Foundation on 20th October in Munich, Germany, for the invention of the erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA).

Previous winners of the award, which is claimed to be the foremost technology award in Europe, include Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web; Thomas Haug for the GSM digital telephone system; and Ray Dolby for sound systems. The Bavarian State Minister Erwin Huber will present the awards during a ceremony in the Hall of Fame at Munich's Deutsches Museum. The total value of the award is DEM 300,000 (GBP 94,500) which will be distributed among the winners. The recipients can use the funds as they wish.

It is believed that Payne was the world's first doctoral student in the field of optical-fiber communication. He previously won several awards for inventing the EDFA in 1998, including the prestigious Benjamin Franklin medal in the US. Payne is currently working on further developments in fiber optics at Southampton Photonics, the UK-based supplier of fiber-based components and subsystems for optical networking, which he founded in February 2000.