|
DARPA Awards $9.5M Program to Erich P. Ippen of RLE
Program
to seek dramatic advances in ultrahigh resolution sensing
and imaging
For Immediate Release
FRIDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2005
Contact: William Smith, Assistant Director for Finance and
Sponsor Relations
Phone: +1.617.253.5621
Email: whs@mit.edu
Cambridge, MA 10.07.2005
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) has awarded a three and a half-year, $9.5 million
program to Professor Erich
P. Ippen of the Research Laboratory
of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). The project, entitled, "Optical Arbitrary Waveform
Generation for Ultrahigh Resolution Sensing and Imaging," seeks
to achieve unprecedented levels of performance for ultra-broadband
coherent optical systems and enable dramatic future advances
in high level applications such as high-resolution 3-D imaging,
novel chemical sensing and ultra-broadband optical communications.
"This is challenging but very exciting," said
Ippen, who is Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Professor of Physics. "We have an opportunity to
achieve an entirely new level of control over the optical
spectrum." Professor Ippen's RLE co-principal investigators
are Franz X. Kaertner and Leslie
A. Kolodziejski, both professors
in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science.
Professor Ippen leads a multi-institutional team that includes
collaborators at the University of California, Davis, where
the lead co-principal investigator is Prof. S. J. Ben Yoo,
as well as industry partners Inphi, Inc. of Westlake Village,
CA, and Multiplex, Inc. and Inplane Photonics, Inc. both
of South Plainfield N. J.
The goals of the new program include extending the state-of-the-art
of femtosecond laser optical comb technology significantly
in repetition rate, power and stability, developing novel
methods for locking femtosecond combs to advanced frequency
standards, and creating very advanced high-speed integrated
photonic circuitry for imposing precise amplitude and phase
control on all frequency components over bandwidths of many
terahertz.
Said Jeffrey H. Shapiro, Director of RLE and Julius A. Stratton
Professor of Electrical Engineering, "This new DARPA
project, which is the largest Department of Defense program
ever awarded to RLE, and the second largest ever from any
sponsor, builds on the Laboratory's strengths in photonics,
particularly our world leading efforts in femtosecond-laser
frequency-comb technology and nanoscale device fabrication.
It also reflects the success of our researchers in bringing
together multi-disciplinary teams that span diverse research
capabilities and organizations."
The work is funded by the Defense Sciences Office (DSO)
and Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) of DARPA.
|
