Boston Chapter of the IEEE Photonics Society

Abstract:  Advances in ultrafast optics have created dramatic new capabilities for a variety of applications such as optical clocks, medical imaging, micro-machining, and precision sampling and signal processing, as well as for a wide range of science. Many of these applications do not themselves rely on ultrafast time resolution but benefit from the ultrawide bandwidths, low temporal coherence, low noise or high peak powers of ultrashort light pulses. This talk will describe briefly the femtosecond laser state-of-the-art that makes these things possible and will illustrate how it enables such a wide range of uses.

Biography:  Erich P. Ippen is the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Physics at MIT. He is one of the leaders of RLE's Optics and Quantum Electronics Group. Ippen received the SB in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, and then attended the University of California, Berkeley where he received his MS in 1965 and PhD in 1968 in Electrical Engineering. He was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1968 to 1980 where he was one of the founders of the field of femtosecond optics. He joined the MIT faculty in 1980. Ippen is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many honors include being named the 2001-2002 recipient of MIT's James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award in recognition of his extraordinary contributions to his fields and to the Institute. Ippen and his group continue to pioneer important new areas of optics, particularly in the areas of femtosecond science and ultra-highspeed devices, inventing new methods for generating extremely short bursts of light using lasers, innovating techniques to exploit the time resolution such pulses provide, and using these new techniques to probe ultrafast phenomena in materials.