CREOL Alum Awarded Fellowship to Continue Research at Los Alamos National Laboratories

After earning his doctorate at CREOL, Layton Hall says his job search got a little inspiration from Hollywood.

“I was starting to think about what comes after the PhD,” Hall says. “Then I went to go see ‘Oppenheimer’. I thought, wait a minute. So I looked at their list of jobs, and saw a few that involved beam shaping at Los Alamos National Laboratories.”

That’s the same thread of research Hall investigated during his time at CREOL. He and his advisor Professor Ayman Abouraddy discovered a “loophole” in a laser physics theorem that concerns space-time wave packets.

Hall explains: “Essentially what we do is sculpt a beam in both space and time to produce a 1-to-1 correlation between the spatial and temporal degrees of freedom. As a result, we can control the dispersive and diffraction characteristics of a particular beam. For example, we can control the group velocity to be any value between minus infinity to positive infinity. So you can make a bullet of light travel faster or slower than the speed of light. And in addition, they can be diffraction-free, meaning that it does not spread as it propagates. This has many applications in directed energy and free-space communication.”

Their findings were published in journals ranging from Nature Physics to Physical Review Letters. Hall says Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) was also interested. After applying, Hall was invited to write a proposal, which led to his selection as a Frederick Reines Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow. The appointment honors Reines, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the neutrino.

Only a single Reines Fellow is selected each year, and this is the first time a CREOL graduate has received the honor.

“It’s a very high honor,” Hall says, noting that this is the continuation of a journey that started at CREOL.

“I feel like I became a scientist during that time period. You grow up in so many ways, not just professionally, but as a person, too.”

Hall’s plan now is to continue that growth over the course of the three-year fellowship.

“One of the big things about national labs is collaborating – because you have some of the greatest scientists and greatest minds in the world all in one place. So I want to learn as much as I can from the staff scientists that are there.”

And it doesn’t hurt that his new home is as picturesque as a Hollywood film.

“The town of Los Alamos is absolutely gorgeous,” Hall says. “The scenery is breathtaking.”