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Faculty Profile

Clifford Pollock

Department: ECE

Title: Ilda and Charles Lee Professor of Engineering

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Degrees earned:
 B.S. Rice University 1976
 M.S. Rice University 1979
 Ph.D. Rice University 1981

Address:
Office:
 312 Phillips Hall
 Ithaca, NY, 14853

Office Phone: (607) 255-5032

Biography:

Following graduate school at Rice University, Pollock was an NRC/NBS postdoctoral Fellow at the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, CO where he participated in the development of a frequency chain that led to the adoption of a new international standard for the meter. He joined the Faculty of the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell in 1983, where he is presently the Ilda and Charles Lee Professor of Engineering. He maintains a research group of 3-4 graduate students, and is involved in tunable solid state laser development, and ultrafast pulse generation.
Pollock was the Director of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2001 to 2008 . Prior to serving as Director, Pollock served as Associate Director and was the Academic Program Leader for Duffield Hall, Cornell's new nanofabrication facility. As Program Leader, he was responsible for interfacing between the university faculty and the building design team. Pollock was a member of the Defense Science Study Group in 1994-1996, and has been a member of the Army Scientific Advisory Board.
Pollock won the college Tau Beta Pi Outstanding Teacher Award in 1988, the C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Young Educator Award from HKN in 1989, and was named a Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell in 1997.
Research accomplishments include the discovery and development of the NaCl color center laser, which is the most powerful, stable color center laser yet discovered, and development of a tunable infrared femtosecond laser. He has actively participated in the development of ultrafast pulse generation techniques, Cr-doped lasers for the infrared, and optical sensors.  Pollock is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the Optical Society of America. At Cornell, he is affiliated with the Cornell Center for Materials Research and the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility.  Personal interests include woodworking and reading.

Research interests:

Pollock runs an experimental research program in laser development and application. Activity includes the generation of ultrashort optical pulses using advanced modelocking techniques, the development of new solid state lasers (such as Cr:ZnSe and Cr:YAG), semiconductor- diode pumping of solid state lasers, and interaction of ultrashort pulses with fiber optic devices. Recent new work involves using laser interference patterns to create an optical ruler that can allow an AFM tip to be precisely positioned to sub-nm accuracy. Other current work involves fabrication of thin-film waveguide lasers, femtosecond optical parametric oscillators, ultrafast material characterization, and high power laser design.

Selected Publications:

C. R. Pollock, “Ultrafast optical Pulses,” Chapter 4, Progress in Optics Vol. 51, Emil Wolf, ed., pp. 211-247, Elsevier, Amsterdam, (2008)

C.R. Pollock, N.A. Brilliant, D. Gwin, T.J. Carrig, W.A. Alford. "Mode locked and Q-switched Cr:ZnSe laser using a semiconductor saturable absorbing mirror.". Advanced Solid State Photonics 2005 98 (2005).

Timothy J. Carrig, Gregory J. Wagner, Alphan Sennaroglu, Jay Y. Jeong, and Clifford R. Pollock. "Mode-locked Cr2+ :ZnSe laser,". Optics Letters 25, 168-170 (2000).

E. J. Mozdy and C. R. Pollock. "Chaos in additive-pulse mode-locked lasers,". Applied Physics Letters 77, 1771-1773 (2000).