Physicist Prof. Dr. Lingling Huang has received the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She was nominated by the Paderborn physicist Prof. Dr. Thomas Zentgraf. Huang has been a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology in Beijing, China, since 2018 and previously spent a year as a visiting scientist at the University of Paderborn. The award is granted annually by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to up to 20 outstanding scientists* working abroad. The award, which is endowed with 45,000 euros, is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and includes an invitation to carry out a research project of her own choice at a scientific institution in Germany.
Huang works on nanophotonics and metamaterials, and is one of the most cited scientists internationally, particularly in the field of holography. Among other things, she has developed a concept for using phase discontinuities on metastructures to generate three-dimensional holograms. In later work, she was able to further increase the amount of information that can be stored in a hologram and overcome the limitations of previous concepts for generating holograms.
Collaboration with Zentgraf's group recently led to the publication of an article in Science Advance. In it, a way to split information using meta-surface holography and assign it to different people is presented. The entire information can only be reconstructed if all persons involved combine their partial information. This can be used as a basis for new, optical encryption methods.
"The Department of Physics at the University of Paderborn warmly congratulates Professor Huang on the award of this outstanding prize," said Zentgraf. In order to further promote the collaboration, another research stay of the scientist at the University of Paderborn is already being planned.
