UC Santa Barbara Materials Distinguished Professor Claude Weisbuch has received the French Académie des Sciences Medal for Scientific Applications. The Académie des Sciences awards about 80 prizes every year to outstanding researchers of all ages in basic or applied science fields. Prize winners were awarded at ceremonies in October.

“Receiving this Medal for Scientific Applications from the French Academy is a recognition of my lifelong research on applying basic science to applications,” said Weisbuch, an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the recipient of the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors Welker Medal. “At the same time, I’ve been conducting very fundamental research on light and materials and searching for solutions to application challenges.”

Weisbuch, a member of the Solid State Lighting and Energy Center, Center for Energy Efficient Materials, and Interdisciplinary Center for Wide Bandgap Semiconductors, came to UCSB in 2003. He worked primarily on the optics of semiconductors, such as the strong light-matter coupling in microcavities, and on the physics and applications of low-dimensional structures such as quantum-well and quantum-dot lasers. Weisbuch says he is most proud of his collaborative work on nitride light-emitting diodes ( LEDs) at UCSB which yielded two basic results, identifying Auger-Meitner non-radiative recombination as the culprit for the decrease of LED efficiency at high currents, and the ability to model how the energy disorder induced by the compositional fluctuations of the alloy-based active layers in LEDs affect their properties.