ABQ Times

Tara Drake, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at The University of New Mexico, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. The award is NSF’s most prestigious recognition for early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in their respective fields.

Drake’s project, “Ultralow phase noise signal generation using Kerr-microresonator optical frequency combs,” explores a critical tool in precision measurement. Optical frequency combs are used in various applications such as trace gas spectroscopy for detecting chemical hazards and disease biomarkers, stellar spectroscopy for searching Earth-like exoplanets, and as components of optical atomic clocks. Traditionally confined to specialized optics laboratories, these tools are now seeing broader applications.

“Recently, optical frequency combs have been realized using chip-scale microring cavities and the nonlinear Kerr effect,” said Drake. “The promise of these ‘microcombs’ lies in the possibility of replacing a research laboratory dedicated to precision measurement with a comb-on-a-chip platform that can perform precision measurements far from the optics lab.” However, microcomb precision is limited by material thermal noise, exacerbated by the small volume of the microring.

Building on recent work investigating how material noise affects comb precision, Drake and her team will develop techniques for microcomb noise reduction based on novel cavity geometries and comb operation. Decoupling material thermodynamics from the properties of the comb light represents an important milestone for using microcombs as state-of-the-art precision measurement instruments.

“While thermodynamics of matter are generally well understood, the intersection of thermal noise and nonlinear optics remains largely unexplored. In microcombs, the transduction of thermal fluctuations in the resonator material to noise on the comb light is highly dependent on the details of the comb state and can even differ between combs generated in the same resonator.”

As part of her award, Drake plans to develop a summer academy for area STEM educators focused on designing and constructing optics-based projects (Optical Technology Inventors and Makers Academy, OPTIMA). Attendees will learn principles of optics and optical design and will be encouraged to create projects that can be used as teaching materials. In the long term, Drake aims to expand this program within Albuquerque by partnering with local maker spaces and organizations like the Albuquerque Astronomical Society. The first OPTIMA is planned for summer 2026.

Drake joined UNM in fall 2019 as a faculty member in Physics & Astronomy. She is affiliated with UNM’s Center For High Technology Materials (CHTM) and Optical Science and Engineering (OSE) program. In 2021, she received a Young Investigator Program award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). Additionally, she has been recognized with a UNM Women in STEM award and received UNM's Physics and Astronomy Excellence in Teaching Award for 2021-2022. Before joining UNM, Drake was an NRC postdoctoral researcher at NIST. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Colorado under Deborah Jin's mentorship.

For more information, visit the Drake Lab.

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