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 research addresses a puzzle that has long frustrated laser engineers. When a femtosecond pulse strikes a metal surface, the energy is deposited so quickly that ordinary notions of heating and melting break down entirely. The pulse duration is shorter than the time it takes for electrons to hand their energy over to the atomic lattice, meaning the material’s electrons are driven to enormous temperatures while the atoms themselves barely move at first. This state—known as two-temperature behavior—sits at the heart of why ultrashort pulses can ablate material with astonishing precision, leaving minimal heat-affected zones, recast layers, or burrs around the machined feature. Understanding exactly how the lattice then responds, and how material is ejected, requires a simulation approach that can resolve atomic motion in space and time simultaneously.

Molecular dynamics provides exactly that capability. In the study, the researchers modeled a titanium target as a vast ensemble of interacting atoms, governed by an interatomic potential calibrated to reproduce titanium’s structural, thermal, and mechanical properties. The laser pulse was incorporated through a two-temperature model, in which the absorbed optical energy first elevates the electron temperature, and energy then flows into the lattice via electron-phonon coupling. By coupling this continuum description of the electron subsystem to the atomistic dynamics of the lattice, the simulations captured the full sequence of events: from the instant of energy deposition through lattice heating, phase transformation, and the ultimate ejection of material from the irradiated zone.

One of the study’s central achievements is its systematic exploration of how the outcome depends on laser fluence—the energy delivered per unit area. At low fluences, just above the ablation threshold, the simulations reveal a delicate regime in which the near-surface region undergoes photomechanical stress confinement and fails through the generation and relaxation of intense compressive and tensile stress waves. The topmost atomic layers can be removed essentially intact, propelled outward by the release of stored thermoelastic stress, while the underlying crystal remains largely undisturbed. This gentle regime is precisely what practitioners prize for precision micromachining, because it minimizes collateral thermal damage and produces clean, well-defined surfaces.

As the fluence increases, the picture changes dramatically. The absorbed energy density climbs past the point where the lattice can remain a coherent solid, and the simulation shows the near-surface region superheating far beyond its equilibrium melting point. In this regime, the dominant material removal mechanism shifts toward explosive decomposition: the superheated, deeply undercooled liquid and even critical-point phenomena come into play, and the irradiated volume disintegrates into a mixture of vapor, clusters, and droplets. The researchers tracked the emergence of a foamy, low-density transient structure—sometimes called a subsurface bubble or cavitation zone—that expands from the center of the deposit and ultimately fragments, ejecting both atomic and nanocluster debris. These atomistic observations connect directly to experimental signatures such as the characteristic size distributions of nanoparticles collected in laser ablation plumes of titanium and other metals.

The simulations also shed light on the fate of the material left behind. Below the ablated layer, the models show rapid quenching at rates of trillions of kelvin per second, which can freeze in structural signatures quite unlike those of equilibrium titanium. Depending on depth and local energy density, the resolidified region can display amorphous character, disordered polycrystalline grains, or heavily twinned and defective crystal structures. Such subsurface defects influence surface roughness, hardness, residual stress, and even the biological response of titanium implants whose surfaces are laser-textured. By resolving these features at the atomic scale, the computational study provides a mechanistic bridge between processing parameters and the microstructure that ultimately determines device performance.

From an engineering standpoint, the value of this work lies in its ability to map the parameter space of femtosecond machining far more cheaply and comprehensively than experiment alone. Each simulation is, in effect, a virtual experiment in which fluence, pulse duration, number of pulses, and material temperature can be varied systematically, and every atom can be observed at every instant—something no microscope can achieve. The researchers analyzed how peak electron and lattice temperatures, stress profiles, and ablation depths evolve as a function of deposited energy, allowing them to identify thresholds separating stress-driven removal, phase-explosion-dominated ejection, and regimes where material is merely melted and resolidified without net removal. These thresholds correspond closely to the processing windows that laser manufacturers and job shops must navigate when optimizing titanium micromachining protocols.

The study also speaks to a long-standing debate in the ultrafast laser community about the relative importance of thermal and nonthermal mechanisms. In strongly absorbing metals excited below the threshold for nonlinear optical breakdown, the simulations support the conventional two-temperature picture: the energy deposition is thermal at the electron level, but the subsequent lattice response is so rapid and so far from equilibrium that classical thermal concepts such as boiling points lose their ordinary meaning. Instead, material removal is governed by the interplay of electron-phonon coupling strength, thermomechanical stress confinement, and the kinetics of melting and vaporization under extreme superheating. For titanium, whose electron-phonon coupling is comparatively strong, this coupling time is short enough that lattice heating begins within a few picoseconds, shaping the transition between the stress-dominated and thermally dominated ablation regimes.

The broader implications extend well beyond titanium. The methodological framework—combining a two-temperature description of laser energy deposition with large-scale molecular dynamics—is directly transferable to other transition metals, alloys, and multilayer thin films used in electronics, energy storage, and biomedical engineering. As femtosecond lasers move into high-throughput industrial settings, from drilling cooling holes in turbine blades to patterning stents and creating microtextured antibacterial surfaces, the demand for predictive process models is intensifying. Atomistic simulations of the kind reported here can feed mesoscale and continuum models, ultimately enabling digital twins of laser machining processes in which parameters are tuned in silico before a single physical part is machined.

There remain challenges on the path to fully predictive simulation. Molecular dynamics of this scale captures picoseconds of physical time, while real ablation plumes evolve over nanoseconds to microseconds, and multi-pulse processing introduces heat accumulation over far longer intervals. Experimental validation likewise demands ultrafast pump-probe diagnostics capable of watching plumes and surfaces evolve at the same temporal resolution. Nevertheless, this work marks a significant step forward in turning femtosecond laser machining from an empirically optimized craft into a quantitatively understood science. For a metal as strategically important as titanium—central to next-generation aircraft, prosthetic joints, and clean-energy hardware—knowing precisely how its atoms respond to the shortest light pulses humanity can generate is more than an academic curiosity. It is the foundation for manufacturing the components on which modern technology increasingly depends.

Subject of Research: Molecular dynamics simulation of femtosecond laser ablation of titanium

Article Title: Molecular dynamics study of femtosecond laser ablation of titanium

Article References: Parris, G., Goel, S., Nguyen, D. T., Salter, P., & Zhou, X. W. (2026). Molecular dynamics study of femtosecond laser ablation of titanium. npj Advanced Manufacturing. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44334-026-00114-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44334-026-00114-8

Keywords: femtosecond laser ablation, titanium, molecular dynamics, two-temperature model, electron-phonon coupling, phase explosion, ultrafast lasers, laser micromachining, advanced manufacturing, npj Advanced Manufacturing, Molecular, dynamics