Robert Boyd

Kara Bren of the Department of Chemistry and Robert Boyd of the Institute of Optics are being recognized for their “efforts toward advancing scientific applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.”

Optical physics and quantum optics will have a profound effect on our daily lives in the decades to come, and two Rochester faculty are among the authors of a new survey of the biggest scientific challenges and questions in the field.

A team led by Robert Boyd has demonstrated that the transparent, electrical conductor indium tin oxide can result in up to 100 times greater nonlinearity than other known materials, a potential 'game changer' for photonics applications.

Rochester researchers and their collaborators have developed a way to transfer 2.05 bits per photon by using “twisted light.” The new approach doubles the 1 bit per photon that is possible with current systems that rely on light polarization and could help increase the efficiency of quantum cryptography systems.

A collaboration between researchers from Canada, Europe, and Rochester has experimentally produced Möbius strips from the polarization of light, confirming a theoretical prediction that it is possible for light’s electromagnetic field to assume this peculiar shape.

University researchers have introduced a new method, called compressive direct measurement, that allowed the team to reconstruct a quantum state at 90 percent fidelity using only a quarter of the measurements required by previous methods.

When scientists in Germany announced in 2012 an apparent violation of a fundamental law of quantum mechanics, The results were both “strange” and “incredible." It took Robert Boyd and his colleagues nearly a year and a half to figure out what was going on.

Robert Boyd, professor of optics and physics and a pioneer in the field of nonlinear optical physics, will be awarded an honorary doctor of science degree this summer by the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

How do you measure a 27-dimensional quantum state, when the act of measuring can lead to its collapse? (photo by Flickr user Martin Cathrae)

Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure for the first time the polarization states of light.