 |
Photo by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
Eli Yablonovitch’s research could lead the next revolution
in information and telecommunications.
|
father of photonic crystals
Engineering professor sees the light
BY WENDY SODERBURG
UCLA Today Staff
Electrical Engineering Professor Eli Yablonovitch is often asked
for his opinion on a number of different topics. Earlier this month,
for example, he appeared on a KCAL 9 television news report to explain
— of all things — car-window tinting.
But that was just a side gig for the scientist known among his
peers as the “father of photonic crystals.” These crystals
— artificial structures that manipulate beams of light in
the same way that silicon and other semiconductors control electric
currents — function as “semiconductors of light.”
Currently, electronic semiconductors are the lifeblood of computers,
but photonic crystals “could lead the information and telecommunications
revolution still further by enabling higher-capacity optical fibers,
nanoscopic lasers and photonic-integrated circuits,” Yablonovitch
explained in a 2001 Scientific American article.
The idea of photonic crystals was born in 1986 while Yablonovitch
was working at Bell Communications Research in New Jersey. Seeking
to make telecommunication lasers more efficient, he and a technician
spent months in the lab, trying to create the first working model.
“We were overconfident ... and it didn’t work right
away,” Yablonovitch recalled. “We kept trying and trying
and trying, and it took four years. We finally found something with
the help of some theoretical physicists.”
Today, photonic crystals have become big business, and one of
the most exciting applications — using photonic crystal fibers
to send a signal all the way to Japan without undersea amplifiers
— could be ready in a few years, Yablonovitch said.
The engineering professor also conducts research in the areas
of optoelectronics, high-speed optical communications and quantum
computing, finding time to serve as co-director of UCLA’s
Center for Scalable and Integrated Nano-Manufacturing and as director
of the Center for Nanoscience Innovation for Defense, a joint effort
with UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside to turn research in the nanosciences
into applications for the defense sector.
Since graduating with a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard
University in 1972, Yablonovitch has gone back and forth between
academia and industry. He worked for two years at Bell Telephone
Laboratories, taught applied physics at Harvard for five years,
then joined Exxon to do research on photovoltaic solar energy. In
1984, he became a staff member at Bell Communications Research,
where he began his work in photonic crystals. Finally, in 1992,
he joined UCLA’s electrical engineering faculty and settled
in Malibu with his wife, Karen, and their two children: Benjamin,
a management science undergraduate at UC San Diego, and Arielle,
a high school sophomore.
The father of photonic crystals no longer feels the need to return
to industry.
“I don’t have to do that because I can help industry
from where I’m sitting now,” he said.
|
