Prof Miles Padgett awarded prestigious IEEE medal
Published: 22 October 2021
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Prof Miles Padgett, Director of the Centre for Quantum Technology at the University of Glasgow was awarded the 2021 IEEE Photonics Society Quantum Electronics Award for pioneering research on the fundamentals and applications of optical angular momentum.
The award honours an individual (or group of individuals) for outstanding technical contributions to quantum electronics, either in fundamentals or applications, or both.
Prof Miles Padgett is a Royal Society Research Professor and holds the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and is internationally known for his leadership in the field of optics and in particular of optical momentum as recognised by the award of number of national and international prizes including the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society (2019) and the Max Born Award of the Optica (2017).
His best-known contributions to the understanding of optical angular momentum include an optical spanner for spinning micron-sized objects, the use of orbital angular momentum to increase the data capacity of communication systems and an angular form of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) quantum paradox. In both 2019 and 2020 he was named by Web of Science as a globally highly-cited researcher.
Miles is also the lead scientist of QuantIC, the UK's Centre of excellence for research, development and innovation in quantum enhanced imaging. The centre brings together eight Universities with more than 40 industry partners to pioneer a family of multidimensional cameras operating across a range of wavelengths, time-scales and length-scales.
His own research team covers all things optical, from the basic ways in which light behaves as it pushes and twists the world around us, to the application of new optical techniques in imaging and sensing. They are currently using the classical and quantum properties of light to explore the laws of quantum physics in accelerating frames, microscopes that see through noise, shaped light that overcomes diffraction-limited resolution and endoscopes the width of a human hair.
First published: 22 October 2021