Stanford Ovshinsky

Led by Federico Capasso and Jérôme Faist at Bell Laboratories in the USA (Prof. Faist is currently with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), a team of physicists invented so-called Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCLs), which are able to reach areas of the electromagnetic spectrum previously untouched by laser light. Today, the ability of QCLs to produce wide bandwidths, high brightness, and high power very efficiently from a compact source has resulted in a wide array of unique products, from hand-held sensors for the detection of explosives and other toxic chemicals to more powerful radar systems.

In the 1990s an Australian research team made up of John O’Sullivan, Terence Percival, Graham Daniels, Diethelm Ostry and John Deane created a technology for the high-speed wireless delivery of data between devices like computers and mobile phones over a network. Their invention made the wireless LAN as fast and powerful as the cabled solutions of the time, and is the basis for the wireless networking technology (Wi-Fi) now used in billions of devices worldwide. O'Sullivan and his team thus ushered in the age of high-speed, always-on wireless connectivity we enjoy today.

German chemical engineer Manfred Stefener, together with Oliver Freitag and Jens Müller, created the first fuel cell for portable use, known as the direct methanol fuel cell. These fuel cells deliver efficient, reliable and clean electricity in a much more compact form than a traditional battery-power supply, even in extreme temperatures. They are already used in a vast array of applications from traffic management, to security and surveillance systems, to powering isolated environmental-data stations.

Billions of lithium-ion based rechargeable batteries are produced every year to power our cell phones, laptops and MP3 players. Discarding them can add up to huge amounts of waste. French scientists Farouk Tedjar and Jean-Claude Foudraz developed a novel solution ─ which is fast, effective, inexpensive and uses less energy ─ to recycle these batteries and recover 98% of the valuable metals they contain.