Albert Polman

Albert Polman (born 21 April 1961, Groningen) is a Dutch physicist and director of the FOM-AMOLF research laboratory in Amsterdam.
Polman received his master's degree in physics (1985) and his Ph.D. degree in materials science and engineering (1989) from the University of Utrecht. From 1989 to 1991 he was a post-doctoral staff researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey). Since 1991 he has been associated with AMOLF, first as a group leader, since 1999 also as a department head. In 2005 he initiated the Center for Nanophotonics at AMOLF; in 2006 he was appointed as director of AMOLF. Polman was one of the initiators of the Amsterdam nanoCenter, a regional facility for nanofabrication founded in 2003. From March 2003 to February 2004 he was on sabbatical leave at Caltech, where he was a research associate in the group of Prof. H.A. Atwater.
Polman is one of the pioniers of the research field of nanophotonics: the control, understanding, and application of light at the nanoscale. He is best known for inventing optical doping, i.e., the incorporation and optical activation of optically active ions in thin-film materials by ion implantation. Polman's research group at AMOLF specializes in fundamental studies at the interface between optical physics and materials science.
In 2009, Albert Polman was appointed as a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.

• Plasmonics Applied, A. Polman, Science 322, 868 (2008)
• Design principles for particle plasmon enhanced solar cells, K.R. Catchpole and A. Polman, Appl. Phys. Lett. 93, 191113 (2008)
• Tunable nanoscale localization of energy on plasmon particle arrays, R. de Waele, A.F. Koenderink, and A. Polman, Nano Lett. 7, 2004 (2007), also featured in Nature 447, July 2007.
• Enhanced non-linear optical effects with a tapered plasmonic waveguide, E. Verhagen, L. Kuipers and A. Polman, Nano Lett. 7, 334 (2007).
• Ultra-low threshold erbium-implanted toroidal microlaser on silicon, A. Polman, B. Min, J. Kalkman, T.J. Kippenberg, and K.J. Vahala, Appl. Phys. Lett. 84, 1037 (2004).
• Measuring and modifying the spontaneous emission rate of erbium near an interface, E. Snoeks, A. Lagendijk, and A. Polman, Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 2459 (1995).
• Room-temperature electroluminescence from Er-doped crystalline Si, G. Franzó, F. Priolo, S. Coffa, A. Polman, and A. Carnera, Appl. Phys. Lett. 64, 2235 (1994).

• PDF version of 2008 publication on Plasmonics. Accessed January 8, 2009.