School of Physics Professor Rick Trebino
School of Physics Professor Rick Trebino has received the 2024 R.W. Wood Prize in recognition of his invention and development of techniques for the complete and rigorous measurement of ultrashort laser pulses. The R.W. Wood Prize is presented by Optica, (formerly OSA), Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide, in recognition of an outstanding discovery, scientific, or technical achievement or invention in the field of optics.
”I’m ecstatic to receive this recognition from Optica,” said Trebino, who serves as the Eminent Scholar Chair of Ultrafast Optical Physics in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech. “The vast majority of science’s greatest discoveries have resulted directly from more powerful techniques for measuring light, so I decided to devote my career to this important field, and it’s very satisfying to receive this honor for my work.”
Ultrashort pulses are brief bursts of light, millionths of billionths of a second long — the shortest technological events ever created. Trebino’s techniques for measuring them have made possible a host of new research and technology applications in many areas, including the fundamental studies of matter and micro-material processing.
Trebino has pioneered ultrashort-pulse measurement techniques for over three decades. In 1991, he invented the frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) technique, the first method for completely measuring arbitrary ultrashort light pulses in time. It took pulse measurement from blurry black-and-white artifact-ridden snapshots to high-resolution full-color images. The FROG technique remains the gold standard in ultrashort pulse measurement and is used worldwide in physics, chemistry, engineering, biomedical, and telecommunications…
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