Keith Nelson Wins Bomem-Michelson Award

http://www.spectroscopyonline.com/keith-nelson-wins-bomem-michelson-award

Keith Nelson of MIT has won the 2017 Bomem-Michelson Award.

 Nelson was presented with the award on Tuesday, March 7, at Pittcon in Chicago, Illinois.

Nelson received his PhD from Stanford University (Stanford, California). He joined the faculty at MIT following postdoctoral work at UCLA (Los Angeles, California). Among his achievements is the work he did on the discovery of new light–matter interactions and their exploitation for spectroscopy and control of coherent acoustic waves, lattice and molecular vibrations, excitons, spins, and their admixtures with light. Additionally, he has developed novel methods for study of solid-state chemical reactions, crystals near phase transitions, glass-forming liquids, electronic excited-state dynamics, thermal transport, and matter far from equilibrium. Nelson has also pioneered tabletop generation of strong terahertz-frequency fields and nonlinear terahertz spectroscopy.

Abstract-Nonlinear high-temperature superconducting terahertz metamaterials

Nathaniel K Grady¹, Bradford G Perkins Jr^2,3, Harold Y Hwang², Nathaniel C Brandt², Darius Torchinsky², Ranjan Singh¹, Li Yan¹, Daniel Trugman¹, Stuart A Trugman¹, Q X Jia¹, Antoinette J Taylor¹, Keith A Nelson² and Hou-Tong Chen^1,4

http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/15/10/105016

We report the observation of a nonlinear terahertz response of split-ring resonator arrays made of high-temperature superconducting films. Intensity-dependent transmission measurements indicate that the resonance strength decreases dramatically (i.e. transient bleaching) and the resonance frequency shifts as the intensity is increased. Pump–probe measurements confirm this behaviour and reveal dynamics on the few-picosecond timescale.