Caltech's Amnon Yariv acknowledged by President Obama and NSF for scientific and engineering contributions to photonics and quantum electronics that have profoundly impacted lightwave communications
President Obama recently dished out National Medals of Science at the White House to 10 deserving researchers and scientists, one of whom the networking world can call its own.
One of these National Science Foundation medals went to Amnon Yariv, who heads up the Optical and Quantum Electronics Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
“A high point of my group’s research was the invention of the semiconductor Distributed Feedback Laser, which today powers the Internet’s fiber-optic network,” Yariv says.
Another highlight: work he and two colleagues on the formulation of a quantum theory of nonlinear optics. “Years after its development, it has become the starting point for the new and futuristic field of quantum communication,” he says.
