Since they first appeared in the 1990s, photonic crystal fibres (PCFs)—thin strands of glass with an intricate array of hollow channels running along their length—have ushered in a new era of linear and nonlinear fibre optics. As well as permitting unprecedented control over dispersion and birefringence, they offer guidance in both solid glass and hollow cores. Curiosity-driven research into the light-matter interactions in PCF has inspired many potential applications, for example: through pressure-adjustable dispersion, gas-filled hollow-core PCF provides an elegant means of compressing pulses to single-cycle durations, as well as underpinning a range of unique sources of tunable deep and vacuum ultraviolet light; chiral PCF is circularly and topologically birefringent, supporting optical vortices and in some cases strong circular dichroism; microparticles optically trapped inside hollow core PCF can be used to sense physical quantities with high spatial resolution; and strong optomechanical effects in solid-core PCF permit stable timing-modulated high harmonic mode-locking at few-GHz repetition rates.
Philip Russell is emeritus director at the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL), which he founded together with Gerd Leuchs in 2009. From October 2005 to March 2021 he also held the Krupp Chair in experimental physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He obtained his D.Phil. degree in 1979 at the University of Oxford, subsequently holding positions at several European universities, as well as IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in New York. Over the last three decades he has been exploring novel light-matter interactions in photonic crystal fibres—a new kind of light guide, which he first proposed in 1991. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Optica (formerly The Optical Society, OPTICA) and has won a number of awards including the 2000 OPTICA Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize, the 2005 Thomas Young Prize of the Institute of Physics (London), the 2005 Körber Prize for European Science, the 2013 EPS Prize for Research into the Science of Light, the 2014 Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis, the 2015 IEEE Photonics Award and the 2018 Rank Prize for Optoelectronics. He was OPTICA's President in 2015, the International Year of Light.