Applied Physics News

Learn more about the recent research accomplishments, contributions, and awards of our Applied Physics faculty members and students.

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Student Team wins DOE Grant to Advance Fusion Energy Research

Columbia Engineering undergraduates lead a team to quantify the interaction of cryogenic ice pellets with energetic particle beams to better understand their behavior in fusion plasmas. More

Oct 05 2023

Venkataraman Receives Humboldt Research Award

Latha Venkataraman, the Lawrence Gussman Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Chemistry, has received a Humboldt Research Award. She will be working on More

Jan 18 2024

Laser-driving a 2D Material

Columbia Engineers pair vibrating particles, called phonons, with particles of light, called photons, to enhance the nonlinear optical properties of hexagonal More

Jan 04 2024 | By Ellen Neff | Photo Credit: Pixabay

Columbia Students and Scientists Shine at Annual Meeting of Plasma Physics

APAM students, scientists, and faculty attended the 65th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics More

Nov 08 2023

Topological insulators let molecular wires grow longer

Research from Latha Venkataraman was featured on the cover of Chemical & Engineering News More

Mar 02 2023

Gaeta Wins Optica's Stephen D. Fantone Distinguished Service Award

Alexander Gaeta is the recipient of Optica's 2023 Stephen D. Fantone Distinguished Service Award More

Mar 01 2023 | Optica

Widely tunable and narrow-linewidth chip-scale lasers from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths

Prof. Michal Lipson's group's paper was published in Nature Photonics More

Feb 22 2023 | Lipson Group

Columbia Engineering Students win Fusion-Energy Design Contest

A team of Columbia Engineering PhD students have been awarded $22,000 for winning a design contest that challenged university teams across the country to More

Feb 06 2023

Altair Leads Seed Funding for Xscape Photonics with $10 Million Investment

Columbia Engineering faculty: Alexander Gaeta, Michal Lipson, and Keren Bergman, along with APAM research scientist Yoshi Okawachi, and Vivek Raghunathan are co More

Dec 23 2022 | Altair

Led by Columbia Engineering, Researchers Build Longest, Highly Conductive Molecular Nanowire

A 2.6nm-long single molecule wire has quasi-metallic properties and shows an unusual increase of conductance as the wire length increases; its excellent More

Jul 06 2022 | By Holly Evarts | Photo Credit: Liang Li/Columbia University

Columbia Faculty Named Highly-Cited-Researchers by Clarivate

Alex Gaeta, Michal Lipson, Yuan Yang, and Nanfang Yu have been identified by Clarivate as “Highly-Cited-Researchers” in 2022. More

Nov 18 2022

Glass device can tell objects apart without needing a computer

A device that uses a piece of glass with little bumps on it can distinguish objects based on how they scatter light, removing the need for a camera or a More

Nov 07 2022 | www.newscientist.com

Columbia University Plasma Physicists at the 2022 APS-DPP Meeting

Columbia University students, scientists, and faculty presented seventy-one research presentations at the 64th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma More

Oct 28 2022 | By Professor Michael Mauel

Nanfang Yu Receives $1.25M to Study Nanostructures in Butterfly Wings

The experimental physicist will use the award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to explore the optical properties of nanostructures in the wings of More

Oct 27 2022

Paz-Soldan Appointed Member of DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee

Prof. Carlos Paz-Soldan has been appointed a member of the DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC). More

Oct 24 2022

'Optical magic': New flat glass enables optimal visual quality for augmented reality goggles

Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have now invented just this kind of glass. Led by Nanfang Yu, associate professor of applied physics and More

Sep 30 2022 | phys.org

What temperature is too hot for butterflies?

Prof. Nanfang Yu discusses how heat impacts a butterfly's ability to fly More

Jun 30 2022 | weirdnewsera.com

Engineers resolve single photons 70x faster than other techniques

Research on advancing quantum information processing from Alexander Gaeta’s lab was recently published in Optica More

Jun 29 2022 | Tech Explorist

POET Technologies Appoints Lipson as Advisor to Board of Directors

Semiconductor technology company POET Technologies appointed Professor Michal Lipson an adviser to its board of directors More

Jun 29 2022 | www.photonics.com

Alumni News: Maurer '00 Named Stewart W. Schneller Endowed Chair

David Maurer '00, professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University, has been named the Stewart W. Schneller Endowed Chair More

Apr 25 2022 | /www.auburn.edu

How Can Quantum Physics Help Researchers Understand the Deep Earth?

Renata Wentzcovitch and her group are currently working with seismologists and geodynamicists on a reference model of the distribution of mineral phases and More

Apr 25 2022 | Columbia Quantum Initiative

Seeing More Deeply into Nanomaterials

New 3D imaging tool reveals engineered and self-assembled nanoparticle lattices with highest resolution yet—7nm—about 1/100,000 of the width of a human hair More

Apr 13 2022 | By Holly Evarts | Photo Credit: Oleg Gang/Columbia Engineering

In Memoriam: Aron Pinczuk (1939-2022)

Columbia Engineering mourns the loss of Aron Pinczuk, Professor of Applied Physics and Physics at Columbia University. More

Feb 14 2022

Navratil: Exciting Times for Fusion Energy Research

Gerald Navratil, the Edison Professor of Applied Physics, discusses exciting breakthroughs in the field of nuclear fusion at large More

Mar 23 2022 | Inverse

Columbia Graduate Students Present Research at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics

APAM graduate students, scientists, and faculty attended the 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) More

Jan 04 2022

New Device Modulates Visible Light—Without Dimming It—with the Smallest Footprint and Lowest Power Consumption

Visible-spectrum, compact, power-efficient, low-loss phase modulator is a breakthrough in integrated photonics; the device will improve LIDAR for remote sensing More

Nov 22 2021 | By Holly Evarts | Photo credit: Heqing Huang and Cheng-Chia Tsai/Columbia Engineering

Yu Named 2022 Optica Fellow

Nanfang Yu has been named a 2022 Optica Fellow "for the invention and development of metasurfaces and their application to imaging and cooling". More

Nov 19 2021

A dimensionality reduction algorithm for mapping tokamak operational regimes using a variational autoencoder (VAE) neural network

A new paper by members of the Plasma Physics Lab was published this week in the journal "Nuclear Fusion" describing the use of machine learning methods to More

Nov 23 2021

Passive-aggressive: New coil stands ready to tame runaway electrons

Prompted by a theoretical idea from Prof. Allen Boozer, the SPARC design includes an innovative new coil structure which promises fully passive protection from More

Nov 09 2021 | Phys.org

Dynamic control of photon lifetime for quantum random number generation

A new paper from Gaeta's Quantum and Nonlinear Photonics Group & Lipson's Nanophotonics Group was published by Optica. More

Nov 08 2021

Synchronization of nonsolitonic Kerr combs

Bok Young Kim's paper has been published by Science Advances. More

Oct 20 2021

Paz-Soldan receives DOE awards for work to advance Fusion Science and Control at National Facilities

The awards recognize Prof. Paz-Soldan’s past and future contributions to harnessing controlled fusion reactions on earth More

Sep 25 2021

In Memoriam: Thomas C. Marshall

Columbia Engineering mourns the loss of Thomas C. Marshall, Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics More

Aug 05 2021

Paz-Soldan Honored for Contributions to Plasma Physics Research

Carlos Paz-Soldan has been named recipient of the 2021 Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research from the More

Aug 02 2021 | Columbia Engineering

Venkataraman - Electrifying Chemistry

Latha Venkataraman pioneers a new method for ‘green chemistry’ More

Jun 24 2021 | Columbia Engineering Magazine

Mauel Featured in Newsweek

"Delivery of the first ITER Central Solenoid module is an exciting milestone for the demonstration of fusion energy . . . " More

Jun 21 2021 | Newsweek

Harnessing Quantum Properties to Create Single-Molecule Devices

Columbia team discovers 6nm-long single-molecule circuit with enormous on/off ratio due to quantum interference; finding could enable faster, smaller, and more More

Dec 07 2020 | By Holly Evarts | Image Credit: Julia Greenwald and Suman Gunasekaran/Columbia Engineering

Coming Home to Math - Problems & Solutions

Prof. Irving Herman offers problems & solutions for his book, Coming Home to Math More

May 20 2021

Okawachi Named a 2021 OSA Fellow

Dr. Yoshitomo Okawachi was named a 2021 Fellow of The Optical Society (OSA) More

May 11 2021

Fooling fusion fuel: How to discipline unruly plasma

Prof. Paz-Soldan, a co-author of a new Physical Review Letters article, was featured in ScienceDaily More

Apr 27 2021 | ScienceDaily

Lipson Group Paper Named February Optics Express Top Download

Michal Lipson's group's paper, "2D beam steerer based on metalens on silicon photonics," was named an Optics Express Top Downloads from February 2021 More

Mar 10 2021 | Lipson Group

Building Tough 3D Nanomaterials with DNA

Columbia Engineers use DNA nanotechnology to create highly resilient synthetic nanoparticle-based materials that can be processed through conventional More

Mar 19 2021 | By Holly Evarts | Photos and Animation Oleg Gang/Columbia Engineering

Mauel Receives Fusion Power Associates 2020 Leadership Award

Michael E. Mauel, Professor of Applied Physics, received the 2020 Leadership Award from the Fusion Power Associates (FPA) for his outstanding leadership More

Dec 18 2020

Prof. Michal Lipson Named 2021 John Tyndall Award Recipient

Lipson, the first woman to win this award, is honored for her pioneering work in photonics. More

Oct 30 2020 | By HOLLY EVARTS | PHOTO CREDIT: JOHN ABBOTT

Lipson Wins 2020 Erna Hamburger Prize by EPFL-WISH

Michal Lipson was named the Erna Hamburger Prize Winner 2020 by the EPFL-WISH) (Women In Science & Humanities) Foundation More

Nov 16 2020 | Lipson Group

Press Release

Okawachi Named Chair-Elect for Optical Society's Integrated Photonics Technical Group

Mar 29 2021

Press Release

Columbia Scientists Present Latest Results at APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting

Columbia fusion scientists & students presented their latest results during the 62nd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics More

Nov 12 2020 | By Michael Mauel

Press Release

Paz-Soldan receives DOE awards for work to advance Fusion Science and Control at National Facilities

The awards recognize Prof. Paz-Soldan’s past and future contributions to harnessing controlled fusion reactions on earth More

Sep 25 2021

Press Release

Is Nuclear Fusion Finally Within Reach?

"Imagine a society where we don’t have to worry about the supply of energy or the cost of sustainability." - Michael Mauel, Professor of Applied Physics More

Sep 15 2020 | By Ryan Mandelbaum | Columbia Engineering Magazine

Press Release

Prof Oleg Gang Makes 3-D Nanosuperconductors with DNA

Complex 3-D nanoscale architectures based on DNA self-assembly can conduct electricity without resistance and may provide a platform for fabricating quantum More

Nov 10 2020 | By Ariana Manglaviti | Illustration Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Press Release

Okawachi Elected Optical Society Fellow

Yoshi Okawachi, a Research Scientist in the APAM Department was elected a fellow of The Optical Society. More

Oct 07 2020

Press Release

Lipson on All Things Photonics

Prof. Michal Lipson was interviewed on the All Thing Photonics Podcast in the episode, “Silicon Photonics in the Fast Lane, Light on a Chip, and 20-Plus Years More

Sep 22 2020 | All Things Photonics

Press Release

Columbia Wins $1.8M NSF Grant for CCI Phase 1 Center for Chemistry with Electric Fields

Led by Applied Physics Prof. Latha Venkataraman with Department of Chemistry colleagues, the new ChEF center will focus on developing methods to use electric More

Sep 01 2020 | Columbia Engineering News

Press Release

Lipson Elected 2021 Vice President of The Optical Society (OSA)

Michal Lipson, the Eugene Higgins Professor Electrical Engineering and Professor of Applied Physics, has been elected 2021 Vice President of The Optical Society More

Sep 15 2020 | The Optical Society

Press Release

Quantum Leaps

There's much excitement about how quantum computers will transform communications technology. They may also very well hold a key to combating climate change. More

Oct 21 2020 | Columbia Engineering Magazine

In the Media

Columbia Partners in National Effort to Spur Advancements in Quantum Science

Three Columbia Engineering and University researchers have joined a $115 million DOE-funded center that will pioneer quantum technologies. More

Sep 01 2020

In the Media

Gaeta & Yu Receive NSF Grant for Quantum Computing

Professors Alexander Gaeta and Nanfang Yu are part of a team who recently received an NSF funded grant to work on quantum computing. More

Sep 08 2020 | NSF.GOV

Press Release

Assembly begins on ITER, a massive scientific project that seeks to replicate the sun's fusion power here on Earth

Michael Mauel, a professor of applied physics at Columbia University, called the start of ITER assembly "a milestone for international science and demonstration More

Jul 28 2020 | CBS News

In the Media

Crunching The Numbers

Frictionless optical components increase computer performance while lowering energy consumption More

Aug 27 2020 | Columbia Engineering Magazine

Press Release

2020 Senior Award Winners

May 06 2020

Press Release

Herman's New Book - Coming Home to Math

May 04 2020

Press Release

A rainbow of layered paints could help buildings to keep their cool

Apr 30 2020 | Nature

Press Release

Profs Michal Lipson and Mihalis Yannakakis Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Two Columbia Engineering professors are among the newly elected members of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. More

Apr 28 2020 | By Holly Evarts

Press Release

Enabling New DNA-Based Therapy For Anti-Cancer Drug Delivery

Scientists designed a tunable peptide-like molecular coating that enables 3-D DNA origami to maintain their structural integrity and functionality in different More

Mar 13 2020 | By Brookhaven National Laboratory | Images Courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

Press Release

Columbia Team Discovers New Way to Control the Phase of Light Using 2D Materials

Researchers use atomically thin materials—1/100,000 the size of a human hair—to manipulate the phase of light without changing its amplitude, at extremely low More

Feb 24 2020 | By Holly Evarts | Images Credit: Ipshita Datta and Aseema Mohanty/Lipson Nanophotonics Group/Columbia Engineering

Press Release

Mauel Named National Associate of the Academies

Feb 10 2020

Press Release

Gaeta Named Highly Cited Researcher

Nov 20 2019

Press Release

Beating the Heat in the Living Wings of Butterflies

Columbia engineers and Harvard biologists discover that butterflies have specialized behaviors and wing scales to protect the living parts of their wings. More

Jan 28 2020 | By Holly Evarts | Image Credit: Nanfang Yu and Cheng-Chia Tsai | Video Credit: Nanfang Yu and Jane Nisselson/Columbia Engineering

Press Release

Michal Lipson Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Lipson was named in recognition of her “continuing and distinguished achievements in original research.” More

Apr 30 2019 | By Joanne Hvala | Photo courtesy of Michal Lipson

Press Release

AP News Archive

In Memoriam: James “Jimmy” Florakis (11/2/2019)
Navratil Hosts Workshop on MHD Stability Control 10/30/2019)
2019 Plasma Physics Reunion Dinner (10/30/2019)
Zang Named Regional Blavatnik Post-Doctoral Award Finalist (9/4/2019)
Making Her Mark: Q&A with Professor Michal Lipson (5/3/2019)
Venkataraman Appointed Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs (4/24/2019)
Plasma Physics Lab Outreach (4/22/2019)
Student Spotlight: John Brooks (4/17/2019)
Venkataraman Named Gussman Professor of Applied Physics Chair (3/29/2019)
Non-chemisorbed gold–sulfur binding prevails in self-assembled monolayers (3/6/2019)
First "Quantum Photonic Crystal" in Graphene (2/26/2019)
Herman Quoted in Philadelphia Inquirer (1/24/2019)
Lipson Receives NAS Comstock Prize in Physics (1/23/2019)
Gaeta Elevated to IEEE Fellow (1/3/2019)
Mauel Co-Chairs National Academies Committee on Burning Plasma Research (1/2/2019)
Lipson Receives Honorary Doctorate from Trinity College, University of Dublin (12/10/2018)
Applied Physics Students Present Lectures on Quantum Computing (11/30/2018)
Applied Physics Alumni Win APS Awards (10/31/2018)
Davidovits Wins Rosenbluth Award (7/16/2018)
Frequency Multiplexing for Quasi-Deterministic Heralded Single-Photon Sources (6/5/2018)
Stellarator Group Receives $2M Simons Mathematical and Physical Sciences Award (6/5/2018)
Robert A. Gross - A Celebration of Life (5/31/2018)
Irving P. Herman Named APAM Department Chair (5/30/2018)
2018 Simon Prize Winner: Zhaoyi Li (5/9/2018)
Sabbagh granted funding for plasma stability research aimed at disruption prediction and avoidance on leading international spherical tokamak (4/3/2018)
In Memoriam: Robert A. Gross (2/15/2018)
Changing the Color of Light (2/5/2018)
Banerjee Elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (1/18/2018)
Dickerson Named Chief Scientific Officer for Consumer Reports (1/18/2018)
Columbia Engineers Create Artificial Graphene in a Nanofabricated Semiconductor Structure (1/10/2018)
Currents Always Find the Fastest Detour (12/20/2017)
An Introduction to Quantum Physics (12/11/2017)
Nuclear Fusion Project Hails Halfway Construction Milestone (12/11/2017)
Gates '94 Named Editor-in-Chief of Plasma (11/20/2017)
Grierson '09 Receives Kaul Foundation Prize (11/14/2017)
Undergrads Attend 2017 APS Meeting (11/3/2017)
Venkataraman Research Published in Science Advances (11/1/2017)
Sabbagh leads study to predict and avoid disruptions on KSTAR tokamak (8/11/2017)
Columbia Undergraduates Attend PPPL SULI Course in Plasma Physics (6/28/2017)
Herman Named Columbia University Senator (6/1/2017)
Yu Wins DARPA Director’s Fellowship (5/12/2017)
Yu Group Invents Method to Control Light Propagation in Waveguides (4/21/2017)
Senior Spotlight: Lauren Riddiford (4/10/2017)
Launching Four Spacecrafts with One Rocket (3/16/2017)
Venkataraman Featured in Chemical & Engineering News (1/23/2017)
New Faculty Member: Renata Wentzcovitch (1/10/2017)
Wentzcovitch Elected Vice Chair of APS/DCOMP (1/10/2017)
Gaeta Group Research Named an APS Highlight of the Year (1/5/2017)