Mr. Lize received the award for his work on microstructured optical fibres (also known as photonic crystal fibres or PCFs), work carried out jointly with Boris Kuhlmey, a researcher with the University of Sydney, Australia.

Optical fibres are traditionally made from glass. However, microstructured fibres contain air holes and thus have unique properties that allow chromatic dispersion to be controlled and nonlinear effects to be increased or reduced. MIcrostructured fibres are notably used to generate white light from a single colour of light.

Messrs. Lize and Kuhlmey designed a fibre model enabling zero-dispersion in a very wide spectral channel -- or, in layman's terms, in a broad range of colours. These fibres have many interesting potential applications in telecommunications.

Mr. Lize, whose doctoral work is being supervised by Raman Kashyap at the Advanced Photonics Laboratory, met Mr. Kuhlmey during a seven-month stay in Australia in 2004, which was made possible through a grant from the Canadian Institute for Photonic Innovations (CIPI).

The award will allow Mr. Lize to present his most recent findings in San Diego, California, at the end of August.

Congratulations are in order!

For more information on optical fibres:

http://oemagazine.com/fromTheMagazine/jun02/tutorial.html
http://www.crystal-fibre.com/technology/technology_tutorial.shtm