Nick Vamivakas

Vamivakas succeeds Melissa Sturge-Apple as dean of graduate education and postdoctoral affairs in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering.

Rochester researchers are trapping nanoparticle-sized silica beads in an “optical tweezer” in a series of experiments that could shed new light on the fundamental properties of lasers.

In addition to their Nobel noteworthiness, Rochester researchers continue to develop new ways to apply lasers in research, medicine, and everyday life in 2018. Because frankly, we’re big on lasers.

For 90 years physicists have known that incompatibly opposite properties are inherent in all elementary particles. Now Rochester researchers say they’ve resolved this weird and inescapable wave-particle duality.

Rochester researchers have created particles with negative mass in an atomically thin semiconductor, using a device that creates an optical microcavity.

Four Rochester researchers are among the latest recipients of the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for junior faculty members.

Nick Vamivakas, assistant professor of optics, thinks his team's work will make extremely sensitive instruments for sensing tiny forces and torques possible, and could also lead to a way to physically create larger-scale quantum systems known as macroscopic Schrödinger Cat states.

Until now, optically active quantum dots have not been observed in materials consisting of a single layer of atom, also known as 2D materials. Rochester researchers have shown how the 2D material tungsten diselenide can be fashioned into an atomically thin semiconductor that serves as a platform for solid-state quantum dots.

A new combination of materials can efficiently guide electricity and light along the same tiny wire, a finding that could be a step towards building computer chips capable of transporting digital information at the speed of light.