Light Conversations: Celebrating 10 Years of Optica

Gaeta received his doctorate in Optics from the University of Rochester. Gaeta joined Columbia University as the David M. Rickey Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science in 2015. Prior to that, Gaeta was the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering at Cornell University and was Chair of the School of Applied and Engineering Physics from 2011–2014.  He has published more than 300 journal articles in quantum and nonlinear photonics. He served as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Optica from 2014–2020 and Chair of the Optica Publications Council in 2022. He co-founded Xscape Photonics, Inc. and served as the CEO from 2021–2023.  He is a Fellow of Optica, APS and IEEE, and a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher, and was awarded the 2019 Charles H. Townes Medal from Optica.

Prem Kumar is the editor-in-chief of Optica. Kumar is professor of information technology in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, U.S.A. He also holds an appointment as professor of physics and astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. His research focuses on nonlinear and quantum optical devices for applications, including photonic entanglement in quantum information networks; novel quantum light states for precision measurements, imaging, and sensing; and networked classical optical communications.

Kumar is an Optica Fellow who has been active on various Optica conference program committees. He led a student chapter, served on Optica's Publications Council, and was a member of a committee to review Optics Express. Kumar was a topical editor for Optics Letters for ten years and guest edited the Journal of the Optical Society of America B centennial article collection in 2016. 

Nathalie Picqué is Director at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy and Professor of Physics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Previously, she was a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany, and, before that, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Orsay, France. She received her doctoral degree in physics from the University Paris-Saclay, France, in 1998.

Picqué is a pioneer in the development and application of techniques of spectroscopy over broad spectral bandwidths with optical frequency combs. These methods include dual-comb spectroscopy and Fourier-transform spectroscopy with a laser frequency comb. She showed how to interrogate and analyze broadband molecular spectra with thousands or millions of comb lines simultaneously. Dual-comb interferometers without moving parts perform direct frequency measurements over a wide span, with no geometric limitations to resolution. They have created new opportunities for precision spectroscopy and for miniaturized spectrometers on photonic chips. Dual-comb spectroscopy has now spread around the world.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2013 Coblentz Award, the 2021 Gentner-Kastler Prize, the 2022 Helmholtz Prize, and the 2022 Falling Walls Science Breakthrough in Physical Sciences. She is a Fellow of Optica and received the society’s 2024 William F. Meggers Award, “For pioneering broadband molecular spectroscopy with interfering frequency combs.”