The 天美影视传媒 is proud to announce that more than 40 faculty and researchers who completed their work while at UW have been named on the annual list from Clarivate.

The annual list identifies researchers who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Their names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index.

The list of faculty and researchers whose primary affiliation is with the UW or with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation who were acknowledged for their work includes:

David Baker

William A. Banks

Gregory N. Bratman

Steven L. Brunton

Guozhong Cao

William A. Catterall

Helen Chu

David H. Cobden

Katharine H.D. Crawford

Riza M. Daza

Frank DiMaio

Evan E. Eichler

Michael Gale Jr.

Raphael Gottardo

Allison J. Greaney

Alexander L. Greninger

Simon I. Hay

Celestia S. Higano

Neil P. King

James B. Leverenz

Charles M. Marcus

Philip Mease

Ali Mokdad

Thomas J. Montine*

Christopher J. L. Murray

Mohsen Naghavi

William S. Noble

Young-Jun Park

David M. Pigott

Stanley Riddell

Andrea Schietinger **

Jay Shendure

M. Alejandra Tortorici

Troy R. Torgerson***

Cole Trapnell

David Veesler

Theo Vos

Alexandra C. Walls****

Bryan J. Weiner

Spencer A. Wood

Sanfeng Wu

Di Xiao

Xiaodong Xu

The that determines the 鈥渨ho鈥檚 who鈥� of influential researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. It also uses the tallies to identify the countries and research institutions where these scientific elite are based.

The full 2023 Highly Cited Researchers list and executive summary can be found online .

* now is at Stanford University.

** now is at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

*** now is at the Allen Institute.

**** now is at BoiNTech SE.

now is at Princeton University.

Lasers play essential roles in countless technologies, from medical therapies to metal cutters to electronic gadgets. But to meet modern needs in computation, communications, imaging and sensing, scientists are striving to create ever-smaller laser systems that also consume less energy.

The UW nanolaser, developed in collaboration with Stanford University, uses a tungsten-based semiconductor only three atoms thick as the 鈥済ain material鈥� that emits light. The technology is described in a paper published in the .

鈥淭his is a recently discovered, new type of semiconductor which is very thin and emits light efficiently,鈥� said , lead author and a UW doctoral candidate in physics. 鈥淩esearchers are making transistors, light-emitting diodes, and solar cells based on this material because of its properties. And now, nanolasers.鈥�

Nanolasers 鈥� which are so small they can鈥檛 be seen with the eye 鈥� have the potential to be used in a wide range of applications from next-generation computing to implantable microchips that monitor health problems. But nanolasers so far haven鈥檛 strayed far from the research lab.

Other nanolaser designs use gain materials that are either much thicker or that are embedded in the structure of the cavity that captures light. That makes them difficult to build and to integrate with modern electrical circuits and computing technologies.

The UW version, instead, uses a flat sheet that can be placed directly on top of a commonly used optical cavity, a tiny cave that confines and intensifies light. The ultrathin nature of the semiconductor 鈥� made from a single layer of a tungsten-based molecule 鈥� yields efficient coordination between the two key components of the laser.

The UW nanolaser requires only 27 nanowatts to kickstart its beam, which means it is very energy efficient.

Other advantages of the UW team鈥檚 nanolaser are that it can be easily fabricated, and it can potentially work with silicon components common in modern electronics. Using a separate atomic sheet as the gain material offers versatility and the opportunity to more easily manipulate its properties.

鈥淵ou can think of it as the difference between a cell phone where the SIM card is embedded into the phone versus one that鈥檚 removable,” said co-author , UW assistant professor of and of .

“When you’re working with other materials, your gain medium is embedded and you can’t change it. In our nanolasers, you can take the monolayer out or put it back, and it鈥檚 much easier to change around,” he said.

The researchers hope this and will enable them to produce an electrically-driven nanolaser that could open the door to using light, rather than electrons, to transfer information between computer chips and boards.

The current process can cause systems to overheat and wastes power, so companies such as Facebook, Oracle, HP, Google and Intel with massive data centers are keenly interested in more energy-efficient solutions.

Using photons rather than electrons to transfer that information would consume less energy and could enable next-generation computing that breaks current bandwidth and power limitations. The recently proven UW nanolaser technology is one step toward making optical computing and short distance optical communication a reality.

鈥淲e all want to make devices run faster with less energy consumption, so we need new technologies,鈥� said co-author Xiaodong Xu, UW associate professor of and of physics. 鈥淭he real innovation in this new approach of ours, compared to the old nanolasers, is that we鈥檙e able to have scalability and more controls.”

Still, there’s more work to be done in the near future, Xu said. Next steps include investigating photon statistics to establish the coherent properties of the laser’s light.

Co-authors are John Schaibley of the UW, Liefeng Feng of the UW and Tianjin University in China, Sonia Buckley and Jelena Vuckovic of Stanford University, Jiaqiang Yan and David G. Mandrus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Fariba Hatami of Humboldt University in Berlin and Wang Yao of the University of Hong Kong.

Primary funding came from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Other funders include the National Science Foundation, the state of Washington through the Clean Energy Institute, the Presidential Early Award for Scientists and Engineers administered through the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the European Commission.

For more information, contact Xu at xuxd@uw.edu and Majumdar at arka@uw.edu.

Grant numbers: AFOSR (FA9550-14-1-0277), NSF-EFRI-1433496, ECS-9731293, N00014-08-1-0561, FP7-ICT-2013-613024-GRASP