Juerg Leuthold

Juerg Leuthold is the head of the Department of Information Science and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET) and he is the head of the Institute of Electromagnetic Fields (IEF) of ETH Zurich, Switzerland. From 2004 to 2013, he was affiliated with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, where he was the Head of the Institute of Photonics and Quantum Electronics (IPQ) and the Helmholtz Institute of Microtechnology (IMT). Between 1999 and 2004, he was with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Holmdel, NJ, USA. Leuthold received the PhD degree in physics from ETH Zurich for work in the field of integrated optics and all-optical communications in 1998.

Leuthold’s research interests are in the field of photonics, plasmonics, and THz with an emphasis on applications in high-speed communications and sensing. In the past 10 years, his research group has advanced the field of plasmonics by bringing up some of the fastest optical modulators and detectors. The latest plasmonic modulators feature a bandwidth of 1 THz and the graphene-plasmonic detectors offer bandwidths in excess of 500 GHz. His group has also pioneered some of the first optical memristive devices. They are among the most compact optical devices ever built and operate with as little as a single atom. Building upon their novel devices, he and his institute frequently contribute towards the development of novel systems. So, for instance, his group has recently been able to mimic a Tbit/s line-rate satellite feeder link in a field trial from the top of a Swiss mountain to a city. In his earlier career, he has performed device and system research with III/V semiconductors and silicon photonics.

Leuthold is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE, a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW), and a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. In 2025, he received the Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize, “For pioneering plasmonics based devices and in particular developing broadband modulators and detectors with highest bandwidths.”