College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Honored research

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.