Dr Jonathan Breeze from the Department of Materials at Imperial College London and London Centre for Nanotechnology won the early-career 2019 Henry Moseley Medal and Prize from the Institue of physics for his pioneering work on room-temperature solid-state masers. The Henry Moseley Medal and Prize is given to exceptional physicists in the early stages of their careers.
Masers (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), the older, microwave frequency sibling of the laser, were invented in 1954. However unlike lasers, which have become widespread, masers are much less widely used because in order to function they must be cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero (-273°C).
Dr Breeze’s doctoral work – on the theory of microwave absorption in metal oxides and ultra-high quality-factor microwave cavity resonators, instigated the conception and realization of the world’s first room-temperature solid-state maser in 2012. This maser used photo-excited pentacene molecules as an invertible gain medium.
‘ This breakthrough paves the way for the widespread adoption of masers and opens the door for a wide array of applications that we are keen to explore. We hope the maser will now enjoy as much success as the laser.” – Dr Johnathan Breeze
The pentacene maser was miniaturised by using strontium titanate, reducing the optical pump power threshold by three orders of magnitude, from kilowatts to watts. With this maser Dr Breeze managed to observe vacuum Rabi oscillations and normal mode splitting, the hallmarks of the strong-coupling regime of quantum optics and cavity quantum electrodynamics. This was also conducted at room-temperature and was his first step in establishing masers as solid-state platforms for the exploration of many-body quantum optics and cavity quantum electrodynamics at room-temperature.
Dr Breeze is currently the world’s leading researcher in the field of solid-state room-temperature masers. His work has established a new branch in the field of solid-state quantum technology and revitalised the field of masers, paving the way for a new generation of optical-microwave quantum devices.
