Pinoy scientist bags top research award

MANILA, Philippines - A Filipino professor won the prestigious 2011 Gallieno Denardo international physics award for his work on semiconductor optics.

Dr. Ryan Balili, head of the photonics research of the Mindanao State University–Iligan Institute of Technology, bagged the award for his work on the development of a new source of coherent light, which may be the future in the production of lasers.

Balili, a former scholar of the Department of Science and Technology, will receive $1,000, a diploma and an invitation to a three-week stay in Trieste, Italy where he will conduct a seminar on his work.

The award is given by the International Commission for Optics (ICO) and the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) based in Trieste, Italy to young researchers from developing countries who are below 40 years old, active in research in optics and have contributed to the promotion of research activities in their own or other developing countries.

Since 2008, the Award is called “ICO/ICTP Gallieno Denardo Award” to honor the memory of Gallieno Denardo, who coordinated optics activities at ICTP for more than 20 years.

Balili graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics at the MSU-IIT.

Balili said his work as a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, together with his supervisor Prof. David Snoke, showed that the transition of particles into waves could be done at higher temperature which would require lesser power.

The phenomenon is called Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) named after Indian physicist Satyendranath Bose who worked on the statistics of monoatomic ideal gases and Albert Einstein who speculated this macroscopic coherent state.

Einstein proposed that at very low temperatures a certain type of identical particles, now called bosons, would “collapse,” or condense, into a single quantum mechanical wave.

However, Balili was able to demonstrate the same phenomenon at higher temperatures using polaritons, an energy particle which exists only in a medium that can be polarized by an electromagnetic wave.

“One way to think of a polariton BEC is that it is a state of matter that has some of the properties of a laser and some of the properties of a superconductor,” he said.

Balili and his group at the University of Pittsburgh said that what they were able to show is that the emitted light of the polariton BEC and its electrons are coherent, which is a property of superconductors that allows it to make electric current flow without resistance and wavelike interference of electrical signals.

In June 2006, Balili received the Physica Status Solidi Young Researcher Award for best research and presentation during the 7th International Conference on Excitonic Processes in Condensed Matter at Winston-Salem, United States.