Professor John Bowers Honored as One of The Photonics100 for 2025

We are thrilled to announce that Professor John Bowers has been recognized as one of The Photonics100 for 2025. This prestigious accolade celebrates his extraordinary contributions to the advancement of photonics technologies, cementing his place among the world's top photonics scientists.

After nearly 40 years at UC Santa Barbara, Prof John Bowers is a distinguished pioneer in the field of silicon photonics and PICs. His work developing laser integration in silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs) has been commercialised by Intel, HPE, and Juniper, while millions of transceivers using his team’s licensed technology have been used in data centres. He has also worked on high-speed and high-data-rate transceivers, with data rates of up to 58 Tbps per fibre.

Prof Bowers describes his innovations as the only successful way to integrate lasers and amplifiers on silicon. Existing solutions use indium phosphide (InP) or gallium arsenide (GaAs) substrates and couple to the PIC using fibres. Bowers and his team have developed a way to integrate efficient III-V emitters on silicon, which has been used at wavelengths from 440nm to 3μm. The 440nm GaN emitters and 780nm and 980nm GaAs emitters were coupled to silicon nitride (SiN) waveguides. Longer wavelengths were coupled to either Si, SiN or lithium niobate (LiNbO3) waveguides.

With applications from transceivers to lidar to spectroscopy, Bowers believes that the technology is the most significant to emerge recently in photonics, and is developing into a billion-dollar industry.