Eric Mazur, chair of the Optica Foundation Board of Directors and himself a physicist at Harvard University known for pioneering work in ultrafast phenomena and nanoscale materials, congratulated the honorees on behalf of the organization. In the announcement, Mazur noted that through their research, service and innovation the recipients are already making meaningful contributions to the field, and expressed pride in honoring their achievements along with excitement about the impact they will continue to have. That framing reflects the Foundation’s deliberate strategy: rather than rewarding only completed career achievements, several of these prizes are explicitly built to accelerate researchers at inflection points in their trajectories.

The Bernard J. Couillaud Prize in Ultrafast Lasers goes to Ji Eun Bae of CIMAP at CNRS in France, recognized for her work with mid-infrared high-repetition-rate ultrafast lasers. The technical territory she occupies is one of the most competitive in contemporary laser science. Mid-infrared light, spanning wavelengths of roughly three to ten micrometers, interacts with the characteristic vibrational frequencies of nearly every molecular bond, which makes it the natural fingerprint region for spectroscopy. Generating that light in pulses lasting femtoseconds or picoseconds, and doing so at high repetition rates so that millions of spectra can be averaged per second, opens the door to detecting trace gases, monitoring chemical reactions in real time and probing ultrafast dynamics in condensed matter systems. High repetition rates also improve signal-to-noise ratios dramatically, because laboratory noise tends to fall off at higher Fourier frequencies where the laser signal can be placed.

Building such sources is far from straightforward. Conventional solid-state gain media and the ubiquitous erbium- and ytterbium-doped fiber systems of the telecom bands do not extend naturally into the mid-infrared, so researchers must exploit specialized crystals, chalcogenide fibers, supercontinuum generation and optical parametric oscillators and amplifiers. Frequency combs in the mid-infrared, which act as precise rulers for light and have already revolutionized molecular spectroscopy, depend on exactly the kind of high-repetition-rate ultrafast architecture this prize celebrates. The prize itself honors Bernard Couillaud, the former chairman of Coherent, Inc., and supports early-career scientists pushing ultrafast laser technology forward.

The Gapontsev Prize for Innovations in Fiber Lasers recognizes Marvin Edelmann of Harvard University and DESY and the University of Hamburg in Germany, cited for his work on application-aware adaptive fiber laser platforms for next-generation multiphoton imaging. Fiber lasers, which emerged from telecommunications technology and were dramatically industrialized by enterprises founded around Valentin Gapontsev’s pioneering work on high-power fiber amplifiers, now dominate manufacturing, sensing and increasingly scientific instrumentation. Their virtues include excellent thermal management, diffraction-limited beam quality, robustness and the ability to scale power while maintaining stability.

Edelmann’s award area sits at the confluence of that laser engineering tradition and the demands of modern biology. Multiphoton microscopy relies on femtosecond pulses focused into tissue, where two or more near-infrared photons arrive nearly simultaneously and jointly excite a fluorophore that single photons of the same color could not reach. The technique images hundreds of micrometers deep into living brain tissue, an achievement that has reshaped neuroscience. But biological specimens are optically messy: dispersion stretches pulses as they travel through glass and tissue, absorption varies with wavelength, and different dyes demand different excitation parameters. An application-aware adaptive platform, as the award citation describes it, would adjust pulse duration, wavelength, dispersion compensation and power on the fly to match the imaging task, promising sharper images at lower light doses and less photodamage to living samples.

The Theodor W. Hänsch Prize in Quantum Optics is awarded to Aaron Young of Harvard University for his work on ultrafast and high-resolution spatial light modulation for cold atoms. The prize carries the name of a Nobel laureate whose laboratory atLMU Munich produced laser spectroscopy techniques and the frequency comb that underpins precision metrology today. Quantum optics with cold atoms has become the workhorse platform for a striking array of frontier technologies, including neutral-atom quantum computers in which hundreds of individual atoms are trapped in reconfigurable arrays of optical tweezers, optical clocks so stable they would drift by less than a second over the age of the universe, and quantum simulators that model magnetism and many-body physics beyond the reach of classical computation.

Spatial light modulation is central to all of these systems. Shaping a laser wavefront pixel by pixel allows researchers to steer tweezer arrays, address single atoms, and sculpt the phases that atoms experience, but conventional modulators face a fundamental trade-off between switching speed and resolution. Bringing ultrafast modulation and high spatial resolution together, as Young’s cited work does, could enable control schemes in which the light pattern changes on timescales comparable to the atoms’ own dynamics, a capability relevant to fast entangling gates, real-time error correction and dynamical experiments in quantum simulation. It is precisely the kind of enabling technique that rarely makes headlines but determines what experiments become possible.

Recognition of community leadership is embodied in the Ivan Kaminow Outstanding Early Career Professional Prize, awarded to Marcelo Saito Nogueira of the University of Limerick in Ireland for his leadership and volunteer efforts with Optica and the optics and photonics community. Kaminow, for whom the prize is named, was a legendary Bell Labs researcher whose contributions to integrated optics and lithium niobate modulators helped lay the foundations of optical communications. The prize deliberately honors not only scientific output but the often invisible labor of building the profession itself, including organizing conferences, mentoring students, editing journals and sustaining the volunteer networks through which a global scientific society actually functions. Nogueira’s own research area, biomedical optics and biophotonics for tissue diagnostics, is a reminder that in modern science the roles of researcher, educator and community builder are increasingly intertwined.

Entrepreneurial ambition receives its own recognition through the Milton and Rosalind Chang Pivoting Fellowship, awarded to Timothy O. Imogore of StraalBox in the Netherlands for his work exploring how to transform photonics through gaming. The fellowship is explicitly designed to help early-career scientists pivot into new arenas, often commercial ones, in the spirit of Milton Chang, the entrepreneur who built and led successful laser companies and then devoted himself to mentoring technical founders. The idea of using gaming to transform photonics is less eccentric than it might first appear. Photonics design, like chip design, increasingly relies on simulation-heavy workflows, and gamified environments can lower the barrier for training, crowdsource optimization problems, and recruit talent from communities that never encounter optics in a traditional classroom. Game engines already power scientific visualization, and serious-gaming approaches have proven effective in fields from protein folding to urban planning.

The Thomas F. Deutsch Fellowship in Biomedical Optics completes the list, awarded to Maya Shor Peled of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine in the United States for her work with integrated photonic optical coherence tomography light sources and systems. The Wellman Center, affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, is one of the birthplaces of optical coherence tomography, the interferometric imaging technique that generates cross-sectional images of tissue by measuring the echo delays of light reflected from different depths. OCT has become one of the most successful biomedical technologies ever to emerge from optics, performing tens of millions of ophthalmic procedures annually, while expanding into cardiology, dermatology and gastroenterology. Deutsch, the fellowship’s namesake, was a pioneering MIT researcher in laser medicine whose work helped establish the field. Shor Peled’s focus on integrated photonics addresses OCT’s next great challenge: shrinking complex, alignment-sensitive bulk-optical systems onto chips, where swept-wavelength light sources, interferometers and detectors can be fabricated lithographically, enabling cheaper, more stable and potentially deployable diagnostic instruments.

Together, the six awards sketch a portrait of where optics and photonics are heading. Ultrafast and mid-infrared sources are converging with spectroscopy to read the chemical world with unprecedented speed. Adaptive fiber laser platforms are becoming the engines of next-generation microscopy. Spatial light modulation at extreme speeds is arming the quantum technologies that governments and companies are investing in worldwide. Biomedical optics is moving onto photonic chips, community leadership is being formally valued, and new audiences are being reached through games. The Optica Foundation, established in 2002 as the charitable arm of Optica, the society founded in 1916 and dedicated to advancing optics and photonics worldwide, funds these programs through endowed prizes designed to secure the field’s future. For the 2026 recipients, the honors bring more than recognition; they bring resources, visibility and a network at exactly the stage of a scientific career when both ideas and momentum matter most. In a discipline whose instruments now enable everything from eye exams to quantum computers, the Foundation’s bet is that backing these researchers early multiplies the return for the entire scientific enterprise.

Subject of Research: 2026 Optica Foundation prizes and fellowships for early-career optics and photonics researchers

Article Title: Optica Foundation names recipients for 2026 Prizes & Fellowships

Article References: Optica Foundation names recipients for 2026 Prizes & Fellowships. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Optica Foundation, optics, photonics, ultrafast lasers, fiber lasers, quantum optics, spatial light modulation, cold atoms, multiphoton imaging, optical coherence tomography, biomedical optics, fellowships

The work, carried out by Chong Wu, Junfei Chen, Zhiping Wang and Zhixiang Huang of Anhui University in Hefei, China, relies on a nonlinear optical process known as three-wave mixing, staged inside a cloud of cold atoms. In three-wave mixing, two input fields interact within a medium that possesses a second-order nonlinear response, and the sum of their energies and frequencies emerges as a third field. When one of the inputs is a microwave field and the other is a carefully chosen optical control beam, the output is a new optical field whose frequency sits far above the microwave domain but whose spatial character is inherited from the microwave field that seeded it. In effect, the atoms act as a transducer that reads the microwave beam and rewrites it in optical script.

The ingenuity of the scheme lies in the energy level structure the authors chose. They consider a multilevel atomic system in which two of the transitions are driven by optical laser fields while a third, much lower frequency transition couples to the microwave field. The microwave field in question is not an ordinary beam: it carries orbital angular momentum, the property more familiarly associated with twisted laser beams whose wavefronts wind around the propagation axis like a helix. A field with orbital angular momentum of order l has a phase that winds 2l times around the beam axis and an intensity profile that vanishes on the axis, producing a ring-shaped or vortex structure. Because this winding number can, in principle, take any integer value, orbital angular momentum offers a practically unbounded alphabet of spatial modes for encoding information.

When the twisted microwave field drives the appropriate transition inside the cold atomic ensemble, it imprints its angular phase structure onto the atomic coherence, the collective quantum state shared by the atoms. The nonlinear coupling then transfers that imprint to the generated optical field. Crucially, the authors show that this transfer is coherent, meaning the phase relationship between the input and output fields is preserved throughout the process. Coherence is what separates a genuine quantum transducer from a lossy photocopy: it is the property that would allow the structural information of the microwave field to be recovered, manipulated, or used in later quantum operations at the optical frequency.

To quantify how faithfully the structure survives the frequency conversion, the team turned to a familiar tool from image processing: the structural similarity index, a metric originally developed to assess how closely two images resemble each other as perceived by human vision. By computing the intensity and phase distributions of the input microwave field and the generated optical field and comparing them pixel by pixel, the researchers demonstrate high-similarity transfer of both pieces of information under their chosen energy level scheme. The intensity rings of the vortex microwave beam reappear as intensity rings in the optical output, and the helical phase winding is reproduced with high fidelity, a result that holds across a range of orbital angular momentum values.

The physics behind this fidelity traces back to the way three-wave mixing preserves angular momentum. In any nonlinear frequency conversion process, conservation laws constrain the interaction: energy must balance among the three waves, and so must angular momentum. When the microwave input carries orbital angular momentum l and the optical control fields carry their own defined angular momenta, the generated optical field must absorb the difference, emerging with a well-defined topological charge determined by the input modes. Because the atomic medium is cold and nearly stationary, Doppler broadening and motional decoherence, the usual enemies of coherent conversion in warm vapors, are strongly suppressed. That cleanliness is what allows the structural information, encoded in delicate spatial phase variations, to survive a jump in frequency of many orders of magnitude.

The significance of the result becomes clear when one considers why researchers want microwave-to-optical conversion in the first place. Superconducting qubits, among the most advanced quantum computing platforms, operate at microwave frequencies and at temperatures near absolute zero. Quantum memories based on atomic ensembles, meanwhile, often interact most naturally with optical light. Connecting these platforms demands a converter that can translate between the two regimes while preserving quantum states. Earlier experiments, including demonstrations in cold rubidium ensembles using Rydberg states and coherent population trapping, established that efficient microwave-to-optical conversion is achievable in atomic systems. What distinguishes the new proposal is its explicit focus on structured fields: rather than converting a simple plane-wave signal, it converts a beam whose information content lives in its spatial shape.

That focus opens a distinct set of possibilities. Twisted light has become a workhorse of modern optics, enabling terabit-scale free-space data links, mode-division multiplexing in fibers, high-dimensional quantum cryptography, and entanglement of photons carrying large angular momenta. If microwave fields carrying orbital angular momentum can be coherently lifted into the optical domain, the spatial-mode alphabet of twisted light becomes available to microwave quantum technologies. The authors note that their scheme provides a way to realize orbital angular momentum transmission and spiral phase regulation directly in cold atoms, capabilities they suggest could find applications in quantum information processing, where spatial modes can multiply the information capacity of a single photon or serve as robust carriers for quantum keys.

The proposal also connects to a growing body of work on manipulating vortices in quantum systems, from optical vortices imprinted on Bose-Einstein condensates to quantum memories that store spatial structure in atomic ensembles. Prior studies have shown coherent transfer of optical vortices within atomic media and quantum storage of orbital angular momentum entanglement, but extending these capabilities to microwave frequencies has remained largely unexplored. By demonstrating that the structural similarity between a twisted microwave input and its optical output can be kept high, the Anhui University team effectively extends the toolbox of structured light down into the microwave regime and back up again, tracing a complete coherent pathway between the two worlds.

As with any theoretical scheme, the path from calculation to laboratory demonstration will demand careful experimental work: preparing cold atomic ensembles with the right level structure, delivering shaped microwave fields with well-defined orbital angular momentum, and characterizing the generated optical field with the phase-sensitive techniques developed for structured light. But the reward would be substantial. A converter that faithfully translates the intensity and phase structure of microwave fields into light would give quantum engineers a new degree of freedom in designing hybrid networks, linking microwave processors to optical channels while letting information ride on the twisting of the wave itself. In a field where every preserved qubit and every untarnished phase front counts, high-similarity conversion is not an incremental improvement; it is an invitation to encode quantum information in dimensions that neither microwaves nor light alone could exploit.

Subject of Research: Coherent microwave-to-optical frequency conversion of orbital angular momentum fields via three-wave mixing in cold atoms

Article Title: High-similarity microwave-to-optical frequency conversion via three-wave mixing

Article References: High-similarity microwave-to-optical frequency conversion via three-wave mixing. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-026-05330-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11128-026-05330-x

Keywords: microwave-to-optical conversion, three-wave mixing, orbital angular momentum, cold atoms, quantum information processing, structured light, frequency conversion, spiral phase, atomic ensemble, quantum transducer, structural similarity, vortex beam