Dr. Menyuk is the winner of the 2024 G. G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization. This award is made annually by SPIE the International Society for Optics and Photonics, and it honors exceptional contributions to the field of optical polarization.

Professor Menyuk's award is focused on his nearly forty years of contributions to the understanding of the interplay of polarization effects, nonlinearity, and noise in optical systems. Dr. Menyuk has carried out work that spanned the optical fiber revolution that started in the 1980s and continued through the early 2000s. At the beginning of this time, internet connections were slow and unreliable; but in the end, internet traffic became fast enough to enable the video streaming applications that we now take for granted. Equations and algorithms that Dr. Menyuk developed played an important role in this development. For the past twenty years, his work has focused on frequency combs - a technology that has revolutionized time and frequency evolution and will likely lead to a redefinition of the second. It has long been known that light comes in two polarizations. These polarizations can be separated by polarized lenses. Road glare or glare from the hood of the car is preferentially in a horizontal direction, and a polarized lens that lets through vertically polarized light eliminates a large amount of this glare. In optical fibers, the light in two different polarizations will move at two different speeds, which can lead to signal distortion.

In 1981, a team of scientists at AT&T Bell Labs found that nonlinear effects in optical fibers will lead to the creation of solitons. In an optical fiber, light at different frequencies will move with different speeds. Any optical signal is made up of multiple frequencies, which will spread and distort the signal. This effect is called dispersion. However, in an optical pulse with sufficient energy, the frequencies begin to interact, which is referred to as a nonlinear interaction, and can become bound to each other. With the right energy, dispersion and nonlinearity exactly compensate, and the pulse travels without distortion. This pulse is called a soliton. Dr. Menyuk showed that the same nonlinearity that compensates for dispersion can compensate for the difference in speed between the two polarizations, referred to as birefringence, if this difference is not too large. In most practical cases, this difference is too large, and Dr. Menyuk working with many collaborators showed that randomly varying the birefringence in the fiber, which can be done by spinning the fiber, will then eliminate the distortion.

In more recent work, Dr. Menyuk has focused on micro resonators (tiny optical resonators) where, once again, solitons can be created and minimizing the interaction between different polarizations is important. This work is ongoing and has already led to important results that has been accomplished in collaboration with researchers at NIST and will be published in part in a forthcoming Nature article, 'Kerr-Induced Synchronization of a Cavity Soliton to an Optical Reference'. Most recently, Dr. Menyuk has been named the director of a new research center at UMBC, The Center for Navigation, Timing, and Frequency Research (CeNTaVR).

Read more about Curtis R. Menyuk and the 2024 SPIE G.G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization: https://spie.org/news/curtis-r-menyuk-the-2024-spie-gg-stokes-award-in-optical-polarization

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