Dr. Paul Lane, a research physicist in the Optical Physics Branch, Optical Sciences Division, at the Naval Research Laboratory has been elected as a Fellow of the SPIE. His work has been cited for research dealing with the optical properties of molecular and polymer semiconductors, and the development of efficient and stable organic opto-electronic devices.
Election to fellowship in SPIE is recognition for members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multi-disciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. Dr. Lane is one of
75 new fellows of the society elected this year. More than 900 SPIE members have become fellows since the society's inception in 1955.
Dr. Lane's research career has focused on organic semiconductors, spanning studies of the fundamental photophysics of these materials all the way to fabrication and characterization of devices. Organic semiconductors have attracted much attention over the past several decades for their potential in chemical sensors, transistors, and opto-electronic devices such as light-emitting diodes, displays, solar cells, and lasers. These materials combine ease of processing, inexpensive fabrication, and chemically tunable optical and electronic properties. Dr. Lane's most distinctive contributions have been in applying spectroscopic techniques typically used to characterize materials and, instead, using them as optical probes of device physics.
His most significant accomplishments include: linking the optical properties of linear conjugated molecules and the corresponding polymers, demonstrating that a molecular model is suitable for both classes of materials; determining that the excitation mechanism in phosphorescent light-emitting diodes is charge trapping rather than energy transfer; and combining ultrafast and continuous wave spectroscopy to elucidate the charge transfer and recombination mechanisms of organic semiconductors films. His most recent work compared transient optical and THz absorption on films of organic semiconductors with a layered nanostructure and was published in Physical Review Letters in February 2012.
Dr. Lane received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics cum laude in 1986 from Macalester College and his doctorate in experimental condensed matter physics in 1994 from Iowa State University. Following post-doctoral research at the University of Utah, he joined the faculty of the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Sheffield in England in 1997. He moved to NRL in 2003 and is presently a research physicist in the Optical Nanotechnology Section.
Dr. Lane has given invited talks at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society, the SPIE Optics + Photonics International Symposium, the Laser Science Meeting of the Optical Society of America, and the International Conference on Synthetic Metals. He co-chaired the Second International Conference on Electroluminescence from Molecular Materials and was Guest Editor of a special issue of Synthetic Metals in which the Proceedings were published. He has co-chaired the SPIE conference on Organic Photovoltaics since 2007 and is an Associate Editor of the SPIE Journal of Photonics for Energy. He is a co-author on 10 chapters in research books, the most recent of which was on organic solar cells in the book Self-organized Organic Semiconductors, (John Wiley & Sons, 2011). He has authored or co-authored over 100 journal articles and conference proceedings on photophysics of organic semiconductors and on the physics of organic light-emitting diodes, solar cells, and sensors.