Albert Polman, a scientific group leader at the FOM Institute AMOLF, The Netherlands, has been honored with the Materials Research Society (MRS) Innovations in Materials Characterization Award for “the development, application and co mmercialization of Angle-Resolved Cathodoluminescence Imaging Spectroscopy (ARCIS) as a new tool for optical imaging at the nanoscale, with applications in nanophotonics and materials science in general.” He will present his award talk at the 2014 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting in San Francisco on April 23 at 12:45 p.m. in Salon 7 of the Marriott Marquis. The award is endowed by Toh-Ming Lu and Gwo-Ching Wang.

The plasmonics and nanophotonics community has been struggling with spatial imaging and k-space resolved light modes for decades. Polman’s imaging technique enables a conventional scanning electron microscope to be transformed into a microscope that allows plasmonic and photonic modes to be mapped with nanoscale spatial resolution. With its deep-subwavelength spatial resolution, the ARCIS technique exceeds the diffraction limit by a factor of 10–20 for visible light and by nearly a factor of 100 for near-infrared light. This technique is useful in broad areas of materials research including integrated optics, semiconductor optics, metamaterials, photovoltaics, photocatalysis, geology, and petrology. The technique is being commercialized by the start-up company Delmic, and Polman now operates his ARCIS system as a user facility.

Polman obtained his BSc (1981), MSc (1985), and PhD (1989) degrees from the University of Utrecht. He has over 230 publications and is co-inventor on five patents. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of MRS, and recipient of an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant (2010), the ENI Renewable Energy Prize (2012), and the Physica Prize of the Dutch Physical Society (2014).