Physicist who found a way to trap light wins Canada's top science prize

Sajeev John, a professor and scientist who developed a way to confine and control particles of light, similar to the way electrons are controlled in electronics, has been awarded Canada's top science prize.

John was named this year's recipient of the $1-million Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal — the highest honour given out by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) — on Wednesday.

The medal is awarded annually for "sustained excellence" and "overall influence" of research conducted in Canada.

"Thanks to his discoveries, it may be possible to process information optically rather than electronically, enabling a supercomputing technology more stable and scalable than quantum computers," said a statement from NSERC.

The technique is now being used for non-invasive laser surgeries and the development of a thin solar cell "coating" for buildings, cars and even clothing.

John, a professor and Canada Research Chair in Optical Sciences at the University of Toronto, said the phone call from NSERC president Alejandro Adem, informing him he had won, took him by surprise.

While he's been given more than a dozen other awards, including an appointment as an officer of the Order of Canada and a Citation Laureate celebrating "Nobel-class" scientists, John said this one is "special, in that it comes from my home country and it's a real shot in the arm in terms of carrying out future research."

The Herzberg medal comes with up to $1 million in research funding over five years. It was one of 26 prizes announced by the agency Wednesday. All the prizes are awarded based on nominations by peers and colleagues.

John, 64, was born in India, but grew up mostly in Ottawa, where his father, also a physicist, did a postdoctoral fellowship, and in London, Ont.

He went to the U.S. for university and completed his PhD at Harvard University at a time when there was a lot of interest in trapping and manipulating electrons in semiconductors, which rely on their ability to behave as both particles and waves.

"My supervisor suggested, 'Why don't you do something different from what everyone else is doing?'" he recalled. "And so I started thinking about other types of waves."

At first, he tried to figure out if it was possible to trap soundwaves; then he realized that doing the same thing with light would be a big deal, "because light is, you know, everywhere."

A key difference between electrons and light is that light has a much longer wavelength. That means structures to control them needed to be thousands of times bigger than those used to control electrons in a semiconductor, said John.

"So the trick was designing something like that."