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Vescent Staff Scientist Jen Black and Team Win CO-LABS Governor's Award

Congratulations to Jennifer Black, one of our staff scientists at Vescent, and the rest of her team on receiving the Governor's Award 2024 Technology Transfer for their work in "Pioneering nonlinear nanophotonic systems to revolutionize laser science, quantum sensing, and optical signal processing."

Learn more about their work in the CO-LABS Technology Transfer Award spotlight video.

This is truly a breakthrough, revolutionizing the quantum world as we know it and tackling global challenges. We're so excited for Jen and her team at NIST!

Excerpt from the CO-LABS announcement:

“The team recognized by this nomination has invented methods to shrink laser frequency combs from large-scale laboratory systems to portable microfabricated devices and has led the use of these microcombs in numerous innovative applications.

They have also pioneered the adoption of new materials with enhanced nonlinearity and improved fabrication capabilities. The team’s advances to the field are being rapidly adopted for applications in laser science, precision frequency measurement for optical atomic clocks, quantum sensing, and optical signal processing. Use cases continue to grow as the devices become smaller, less expensive, and more capable. The team’s work has also advanced the much broader and growing field of nonlinear nanophotonics, which is poised to have an even greater impact on technology. Nonlinear nanophotonics systems stand to revolutionize laser science and applications. Integrated photonic circuits can provide precise control of a laser’s optical spectrum in a nanofabricated package, allowing highly specialized laser systems to be constructed with unprecedented compactness and robustness for applications like precision metrology, microresonator frequency comb generation, optical signal generation and processing, sensing, navigation, and the generation and manipulation of quantum information. Replacing free-space optical subsystems with integrated photonics modules not only reduces the size of a laser system for an existing application, but it can also enable new applications that arise from new physics that is accessible with these systems.”