The vice presidency is a particularly consequential position within Optica’s governance structure. The society operates on a well-defined leadership ladder in which the vice president advances to president-elect and then to president, meaning that the person elected to the 2027 vice presidency is effectively being positioned to guide the organization’s strategic direction in the years that follow. Optica’s board is responsible for overseeing a portfolio that includes flagship scientific meetings, a family of peer-reviewed journals, industry partnerships, education and outreach programs, and policy engagement on behalf of researchers working across optics and photonics. With more than 400,000 members and constituents across the globe, the society’s decisions about which conferences to grow, which emerging subfields to champion, and how to support early-career scientists ripple widely through the community. The election of a new vice president therefore attracts close attention from researchers who want to see their priorities reflected at the top of the organization.

Delfyett’s election brings to the board one of the most technically accomplished figures in ultrafast optics and semiconductor laser research. His scientific reputation was established in part during his time at Bellcore, where he developed what has been described as the world’s fastest and most powerful mode-locked semiconductor laser diode. Mode-locked lasers are devices that produce trains of extremely short optical pulses, often lasting femtoseconds or picoseconds, by locking the phases of many longitudinal modes within the laser cavity. Achieving that feat in a semiconductor diode format, rather than in bulky solid-state systems, opened pathways toward compact, high-repetition-rate sources suitable for telecommunications, clocking, signal processing, and precision measurement. That line of research remains central to modern photonics, as mode-locked semiconductor lasers underpin technologies ranging from optical frequency combs to high-speed data transmission in fiber networks.

Since 1993, Delfyett has built his research program at CREOL, the University of Central Florida’s internationally regarded optics and photonics school, where he directs the Townes Laser Institute and holds the rank of University Distinguished Professor. His scholarly output is extensive: he has authored more than 850 publications and holds 45 U.S. patents, and he has translated laboratory advances into the commercial sphere as a co-founder of Raydiance, Inc., a company associated with ultrafast laser technology. His contributions have been recognized with election to the National Academy of Engineering, the American Physical Society’s Arthur L. Schawlow Prize, and the 2026 SPIE Harold E. Edgerton Award, an honor named for the pioneering electrical engineer and photographer whose stroboscopic imaging work became iconic. He is also a Fellow of APS, AAAS, Optica, the IEEE Photonics Society, SPIE, the National Society of Black Physicists, and the National Academy of Inventors, a collection of distinctions that reflects both scientific depth and breadth of service.

Beyond the laboratory, Delfyett has accumulated a long record of volunteer leadership within the scientific publishing and conference ecosystem. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics and as Chair of the CLEO Steering Committee, the body that helps guide one of the field’s largest annual conferences on lasers and electro-optics. His prior governance experience includes service on Optica’s own Board of Directors, membership on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Photonics Society, the chairmanship of the APS Division of Laser Science, and the presidency of the National Society of Black Physicists. That combination of editorial, conference, and society leadership is precisely the kind of institutional fluency that Optica’s membership tends to reward in board elections, and it positions him to step into the society’s presidential succession track with an intimate knowledge of how its programs operate.

Optica CEO Elizabeth Nolan welcomed the election, emphasizing both Delfyett’s scientific legacy and his service record. According to the society’s announcement, Nolan described him as someone who has spent his career pushing the boundaries of what ultrafast lasers can do, whose vision has helped shape modern photonics, and who is a strong leader, a brilliant scientist, and a dedicated volunteer. She added that the society is thrilled to welcome him to the Board of Directors, where his experience and expertise will help Optica meet the evolving needs of the optics and photonics community. The remarks signal that the board expects Delfyett’s perspective as both a researcher and an entrepreneur to inform its decisions at a time when photonics is expanding into new commercial territory, from silicon photonics in data centers to laser-based manufacturing and quantum technologies.

The two Directors at Large positions, covering the 2027 through 2029 term, went to figures who represent complementary corners of the discipline. Sterling Backus is an Advanced Project Scientist at Thorlabs, Inc., one of the world’s largest suppliers of photonics hardware and instrumentation, and an affiliate researcher at Colorado State University. His dual footing in industry and academia mirrors the reality of a field in which much of the instrumentation driving discovery is developed and manufactured by companies rather than built entirely in university shops. Within Optica, Backus has served on the Meetings Council, the body that shapes the society’s conference portfolio, and he is the program co-chair for the society’s Frontiers in Optics meeting for 2026 and 2027. He is an Optica Fellow and previously served as CLEO program chair in 2017 and general chair in 2019, experience that gives him detailed insight into how large-scale scientific meetings are planned, funded, and adapted to changing community needs.

Frédérique Vanholsbeeck brings a distinctly international and interdisciplinary dimension to the board. She is a professor of physics at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where she leads one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most active biophotonics groups. Biophotonics, the application of light-based technologies to biology and medicine, is among the fastest-growing areas of the field, encompassing optical coherence tomography, fluorescence microscopy, laser tweezers, and optical diagnostics for clinical use. Research groups in this area often sit at the interface of physics, engineering, and the life sciences, and leaders like Vanholsbeeck help ensure that the society’s programs serve researchers who do not fit neatly into traditional disciplinary boxes. Her governance experience includes the presidency of the Australian and New Zealand Optical Society, membership on a Marsden Fund panel, which distributes New Zealand’s major fundamental research grants, and multiple leadership roles in major international and regional conferences. She is also an Optica Fellow.

The geographic and sectoral balance of the new slate is notable. Optica has long emphasized its role as a global society, and the election of a director based in New Zealand alongside two United States-based leaders, one from a university research center and one from industry, reflects an attempt to keep the board representative of a membership that spans continents and career contexts. For researchers in Oceania and the broader Asia-Pacific region, Vanholsbeeck’s presence at the governance table offers a direct channel for the concerns of smaller national optical societies, which often face challenges distinct from those of large North American and European institutions, including limited access to major facilities and the logistical burden of distance from the field’s dominant conference hubs.

For the wider photonics community, the elections arrive at a moment when the discipline’s profile has never been higher. Optical technologies now carry the world’s internet traffic, guide autonomous vehicles, enable the precision manufacturing of semiconductors, and provide the measurement backbone for breakthroughs in timekeeping, navigation, and fundamental physics, including the laser interferometry behind gravitational-wave detection. The leaders chosen to steer Optica’s board will influence how the society invests in meetings, publications, and advocacy as these applications multiply. With Delfyett’s ultrafast laser expertise, Backus’s industry-grounded perspective on instrumentation and conferences, and Vanholsbeeck’s biophotonics and international leadership, the incoming directors bring a blend of technical depth and organizational experience that mirrors the field itself: fast-moving, commercially vital, and increasingly global.

Subject of Research: Election of new leaders to the board of the Optica optics and photonics society

Article Title: Peter J. Delfyett, Sterling Backus and Frédérique Vanholsbeeck will serve on Optica’s Board of Directors

Article References: Peter J. Delfyett, Sterling Backus and Frédérique Vanholsbeeck will serve on Optica’s Board of Directors. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Optica, Peter J. Delfyett, Sterling Backus, Frédérique Vanholsbeeck, ultrafast optics, semiconductor lasers, biophotonics, photonics, board of directors, CREOL, Thorlabs, University of Auckland

The man behind the project, Prof. Dr Matthias Wollenhaupt, who leads the Ultrafast Coherent Dynamics research group at Oldenburg, describes the achievement as a genuine extension of what experimentalists can do. “With our method, we can generate electronic quantum states that have previously only been described theoretically and also make them spatially visible,” he explains. “We have thus expanded the experimental optics toolkit to include a new class of three-dimensional light fields.” That statement captures the essence of the result: for decades, theorists have predicted that fully three-dimensional light fields should enable new forms of quantum control, but creating such fields in the laboratory and using them to steer electrons has remained out of reach until now.

The technical trick at the heart of the experiment lies in the combination of two specially shaped femtosecond laser pulses. Femtosecond pulses are bursts of light lasting only a few millionths of a billionth of a second, so short that within the duration of a single pulse, chemical bonds barely have time to begin vibrating. The researchers used an interferometer to split their laser light into two beams of different colours, shaped each pulse with great precision, and then directed the two beams so that they intersected inside a vacuum chamber at a single point. Where the beams overlapped, their electromagnetic fields added together, producing a three-dimensional interference pattern whose geometry the team could control by adjusting the colours, phases, polarizations and relative timing of the two pulses.

“The fields oscillate in all three spatial directions, opening up new possibilities for investigating and controlling specific light-matter interactions,” explains Darius Köhnke, one of the two lead authors of the study and a PhD student in Wollenhaupt’s group. Conventional laser experiments typically rely on light that oscillates in one or two dimensions, which limits the kinds of quantum states that can be reached. A truly three-dimensional field, by contrast, can drive an electron in ways that no one-dimensional or two-dimensional field can, coupling the electron’s motion along all three axes simultaneously. This is precisely what allows the method to access quantum states that are forbidden or invisible to conventional excitation schemes.

To demonstrate the power of the technique, the team applied their three-dimensional light fields to potassium atoms, a workhorse of atomic physics experiments. They used the fields to selectively excite electrons within the atoms into higher-energy states, known as excited states, and then to release those electrons from the atoms entirely, a process called ionization. The properties of the liberated electrons carry a detailed fingerprint of the quantum states from which they were ejected, allowing the researchers to reconstruct what happened inside the atom. Crucially, by varying the parameters of the light field, they could choose which excited states to populate and which pathways the electrons would follow on their way out.

The experiment also functioned like an ultra-high-speed camera for quantum processes. Because the laser pulses are so short, the researchers were able to observe the changes in the electron states at closely spaced time intervals, capturing successive snapshots of the evolving quantum system. The principle resembles stroboscopic flash photography, in which a rapidly flashing lamp freezes fast motion into a sequence of still images. Stitched together, these snapshots form a movie of the electron states as they evolve under the influence of the three-dimensional field. This time-resolved view is what allowed the team to confirm that the theoretically predicted states were indeed being created and to make their structure spatially visible for the first time.

Beyond its fundamental appeal, the method is particularly promising for one of the most consequential problems in modern chemistry: the detection and control of chiral molecules. Chiral molecules come in two forms that are mirror images of each other but cannot be superimposed, much like a person’s left and right hands. This handedness is not a minor detail. Many biomolecules, including amino acids, carbohydrates and the active ingredients of medicinal products, are chiral, and the two mirror-image forms, called enantiomers, frequently have strikingly different biological effects. The body may metabolize one form beneficially while the other is inert or even harmful.

The dangers of ignoring molecular handedness are written into pharmaceutical history. The active ingredient thalidomide, marketed in the late 1950s and early 1960s under the brand name Contergan, exists in two enantiomeric forms: one causes severe birth defects when taken during pregnancy, while the other is comparatively harmless. Because the two forms are chemically almost identical, separating or distinguishing between them can be extremely difficult, and in the case of thalidomide the drug was sold as a mixture of both. A technique that could reliably sense and even selectively manipulate one handedness over the other would therefore be a powerful tool for drug development, quality control and fundamental biology alike.

Three-dimensional light fields may offer exactly that capability. “Theoretical studies show that three-dimensional light fields can also possess chiral properties,” Wollenhaupt explains. In other words, the light itself can be handed, twisting through space in a way that distinguishes left from right. Such chiral light fields could interact differently with the two enantiomers of a chiral molecule, providing a far more sensitive and selective probe than conventional methods, which typically rely on weak magnetic-dipole effects. The opportunities that three-dimensional light fields open up for investigating and controlling molecular chirality were recently highlighted by physicist Prof. Dr Olga Smirnova of the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics in Berlin in an article published in the journal Science entitled “A New Age of Molecular Chirality”. The Oldenburg team writes that their current study lays an important foundation for such applications, bridging the gap between theoretical proposals and laboratory reality.

The work, reported under the title “Multiphoton ionization with three-dimensional light fields,” signals a broader shift in how physicists think about controlling matter with light. Rather than treating a laser beam as a simple one-dimensional oscillating field, the Oldenburg approach treats the full spatial structure of light as a designable parameter, something to be engineered pulse by pulse in order to write specific quantum states onto atoms and molecules. The same interferometric superposition scheme that produced the new states in potassium atoms can, in principle, be adapted to more complex systems, from chiral molecules in solution to surfaces and nanostructures. If the promise holds, the coming years could see three-dimensional light fields become a standard instrument in the quest to read out, and perhaps even exploit, the handedness of nature at the molecular scale, turning a long-standing theoretical prediction into a practical technology for chemistry, biology and medicine.

Subject of Research: Generation of three-dimensional light fields from superimposed femtosecond laser pulses to control electron quantum states and probe chiral molecules

Article Title: Using three-dimensional light fields to control electrons

Article References: Using three-dimensional light fields to control electrons. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: three-dimensional light fields, femtosecond laser pulses, quantum states, multiphoton ionization, chiral molecules, light-matter interactions, potassium atoms, quantum control, ultrafast optics, chiral sensing, Physical Review Research, University of Oldenburg

Diffractive neural networks, sometimes called diffractive deep neural networks, are built from a sequence of thin layers whose transmission or reflection coefficients are optimized by a computer. When a light wave passes through these layers, each point on one layer diffracts light toward many points on the next layer, and the pattern of connections between points behaves like the weights of an artificial neural network. Because the connection strength is set by how light spreads and interferes, the entire forward pass of the network happens at the speed of light. In prior demonstrations, however, the input was typically a static two-dimensional image or a single spatial pattern, and the layers were designed to transform that pattern from one spatial plane to the next. Such systems excel at tasks like image classification, but they treat every input as frozen in time.

The new approach recognizes that real-world signals, from communications waveforms to biological dynamics, are inherently temporal, and that a beam of light carries information in multiple degrees of freedom simultaneously: its spatial distribution, its wavelength, its polarization, and its temporal profile. The researchers show that by manipulating the spatiotemporal light field, meaning the way the field’s amplitude and phase evolve across space and time together, a diffractive network can encode, transform, and classify information that changes over time, all within the optical domain. The network layers are no longer merely spatial masks; they become spatiotemporal operators that shape how different temporal components of the input interfere and propagate.

Technically, the framework treats the optical field as a function of both position and time, and the diffractive layers are optimized so that the light field emerging from the final layer encodes the desired output, for example a classification decision or a transformed waveform. The design process draws on numerical modeling of wave propagation combined with training procedures familiar from machine learning, in which the layer parameters are iteratively adjusted to minimize an error function. Once training converges, the learned parameters are physically implemented in the optical layers, and the network performs inference passively, with no computation performed electronically during operation. This all-optical inference path is what distinguishes the architecture from hybrid optical-electronic schemes, where light performs some operations but electronic processors handle the rest.

The significance of adding the temporal dimension is substantial. A purely spatial diffractive network processes each snapshot independently, so it cannot natively recognize patterns that unfold over time, such as a spoken word, a sequence of pulses in a fiber, or the changing intensity of a dynamic scene. A spatiotemporal diffractive network, by contrast, can in principle integrate information across a temporal window as the light propagates, allowing the physics of diffraction and interference to perform temporal filtering, correlation, and sequence recognition. The authors present this capability as a route toward optical systems that can handle streaming data directly at the front end of a sensing or communication system, before any signal is converted to electronics.

The implications for energy efficiency are among the most compelling aspects of the research. Conventional artificial intelligence hardware consumes considerable power moving data between memory and processing units, and much of that cost is incurred performing the matrix multiplications that dominate neural network inference. Diffractive optical networks perform those multiplications passively, as light diffracts and interferes, so the energy cost of the forward pass is largely limited to the energy used to generate and detect the light. By extending the architecture to spatiotemporal operation, the new framework broadens the class of problems that can benefit from this efficiency, potentially including ultrafast signal processing in optical communications, where data streams already exist as modulated light and never need to be converted at all.

Speed is the other headline advantage. Because the computation is performed by propagating light, the latency of inference is set by the time it takes the wave to traverse the network, which can be on the order of picoseconds for compact devices. For temporal signals, this means the network can in principle keep pace with data rates that overwhelm electronic processors. The authors emphasize that the spatiotemporal manipulation of the light field is what unlocks this regime: by structuring the field in time as well as space, the network can perform operations on waveforms that would otherwise require high-speed sampling and digital signal processing chains.

The framework also connects to a broader research effort aimed at exploiting the full dimensionality of light for computing. Modern optical technologies can control wavelength, polarization, orbital angular momentum, and coherence, and each of these degrees of freedom can serve as a carrier of information or as a computational resource. Spatiotemporal light field manipulation, in which ultrafast pulses are shaped simultaneously in space and time, has matured rapidly in recent years, enabling phenomena such as space-time wave packets and light sheets with engineered group velocities. The new work harnesses this toolbox for neural computation, suggesting that the design space of optical neural networks is far larger than the spatial-only architectures explored to date.

As with any emerging technology, practical considerations will shape how quickly these systems move from laboratory demonstrations to deployed applications. Implementing spatiotemporal diffractive layers requires optical components that can impose carefully designed transformations on fast-varying fields, and the accuracy of the physical implementation relative to the trained model determines the network’s real-world performance. Alignment, fabrication tolerances, and detector bandwidth all matter. The authors frame their contribution as establishing the principles and design methodology for this new class of networks, providing a foundation on which experimental implementations across different spectral bands and platform technologies can be built.

The research arrives at a moment of intense global interest in unconventional computing substrates, driven by the growing energy and speed demands of artificial intelligence. Photonic approaches ranging from integrated silicon photonics to free-space diffractive optics promise orders-of-magnitude improvements in the energy efficiency of certain computations, and diffractive neural networks are among the simplest and most scalable of these approaches, since they can be fabricated as passive optical elements and require no active switching during inference. By showing that the same diffractive framework can be extended into the temporal domain, the study expands the reach of optical neural computation from static pattern recognition toward dynamic signal processing, a capability that could matter for applications as varied as ultrafast imaging, optical communications, lidar, and the analysis of fast biological processes. The work suggests a future in which the front end of an intelligent system is not a camera feeding a processor, but a shaped light field that has already done the thinking on its way to the detector.

Subject of Research: All-optical diffractive neural networks that process spatiotemporal light fields for temporal information processing

Article Title: Spatiotemporal all-optical diffractive neural networks empowered by spatiotemporal light field manipulation

Article References: Feng, F., Zhang, Z., Huo, D., Li, X., Lin, Q., Zhao, X., Hou, G., Dai, D., Somekh, M. G., & Yuan, X. (2026). Spatiotemporal all-optical diffractive neural networks empowered by spatiotemporal light field manipulation. Light: Science & Applications, 15(1), Article 382. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-026-02366-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41377-026-02366-7

Keywords: diffractive neural networks, all-optical computing, spatiotemporal light field manipulation, optical neural networks, photonic computing, wavefront shaping, ultrafast optics, machine learning hardware, energy-efficient computing, optical signal processing, Light Science and Applications, deep learning optics