Constantly throughout his career, Costas Soukoulis has been recognized
for his professional work.
The last few years have been a whirlwind of honors and awards for Costas
Soukoulis, professor of physics and astronomy, and senior physicist with
the Ames Laboratory.
Since the new millennium, Soukoulis has been recognized by several different
groups with prestigious honors.
In that time span, Soukoulis has received:
* An Energy 100 Award and Science 100 Award from the U.S. Department
of Energy (DOE) for the photonic bandgap structure that he developed along
with Ames Lab senior physicist Kai-Ming Ho and physicist Che-Ting Chan.
These awards recognize the 100 most important scientific and technological
discoveries funded by the DOE during the previous 25 years since the department's
inception.
* In 2002, Soukoulis was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America
"for outstanding and pioneering contributions to the understanding
of disordered and periodic systems, particularly the physics of photonic
bandgap materials and random lasers."
* That same year, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Soukoulis was honored for notable
pioneering contributions to the understanding of the localization of light,
of random lasers, and of photonic crystals.
*Beginning in 2000, Soukoulis was first honored by the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences and then by Iowa State University for outstanding achievements
in research.
And just recently Soukoulis was named a recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation Research Award. These awards are given annually to foreign scholars
with internationally recognized academic qualifications. The recipients also
are invited to carry out research in Germany in collaboration with German
scholars for periods of between six months and one year.
Soukoulis, who plans to spend a total of six months in Germany, is currently
splitting time between Germany (University of Karlsruhe), Greece (University
of Crete and the Research Center of Crete, FORTH) and Iowa State working on
photonic crystals, a dream he says he has had since 1990.
"The
discovery of photonic crystals has opened new avenues in efficiently controlling
light propagation," he says. "This property allows light to bend
through sharp corners."
Soukoulis and his fellow researchers believe that photonic crystals could
become the "semiconductors" of the future. Through the use of photonic
crystals, they believe that light can be manipulated in order to further wireless
communications for computers and other optoelectronic devices, along with
developing more efficient lasers.
"There has been a lot of potential
in this area over the last ten years," he said. "Potentially this
can lead to very spectacular results."
While in Germany, Soukoulis will also work on left-handed materials - a structure
composed of copper elements, some in the shape of rings, some ordinary wires,
that causes microwaves to behave in a manner that is unusual. Because the
permittivity and permeability are both negative, the familiar right-hand rule
for electromagnetic wave (EM) becomes a left-hand rule. It reverses every
notion you had about EM behavior of materials.
"The index of
refraction is negative so that light bends the 'wrong way' when it enters
the left-handed medium from vacuum," he said. "A flat plate of this
medium can focus light instead of dispersing it. We therefore can fabricate
flat lenses."
So far left-handed behavior has been observed only in microwave frequencies.
Soukoulis hopes that he will convince his European colleagues to use the well-studied
photonic crystals in demonstrating the left-handed behavior at micron wavelengths.
His recent work on negative refraction in photonic crystals, scheduled to
be published in Physical Review Letters in April 2003, shows the way
of fabricating photonic bandgap materials that possess left-handed behavior.
In addition to working with German and other Euopean research scientists,
Soukoulis is scheduled to give between 10 and 15 international talks on his
work.
