A research team from the Photonics Center’s Laboratory of Hybrid Photonics won the annual Y. I. Ostrovsky Prize for the best study in holography and interferometry. The award was presented for a paper which found out how a previously unobserved object in the field of quantum physics — a cluster of optical vortices with periodically flipping charges — is formed.

The competition for the Y. I. Ostrovsky Prize has been held annually since 1997 by the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology and the Rossiya Bank. The competition is open to works that were performed in the CIS countries and published during the five years before the competition.

The authors conducted experiments — vortices were created in an exciton-polariton condensate in a semiconductor microresonator — and presented new results. The team managed to detect that the charges of vortices varied in a regular manner, switching with a period of one-fifth of a nanosecond. The results hold the promise in optical microscopy, quantum cryptography, enhanced-bandwidth optical communication, analog computation, and optical tweezers tech.

The award-winning team includes Junior Research Scientist Kirill Sitnik from the laboratory, Assistant Professor Sergey Alyatkin from the Photonics Center, Skoltech alumnus Ivan Gnusov, Research Scientist Tamsin Cookson, and Skoltech Vice President for Photonics Pavlos Lagoudakis.