Miro Erkintalo

Miro Erkintalo is a New Zealand physicist specialising in nonlinear optics and laser physics, based at the University of Auckland.

He attended the Tampere University of Technology intending to get his MSc and become a teacher or technologist, but after interning in a research lab decided to become a physicist.

[2] After his PhD, Erkintalo came to New Zealand in 2012 to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Auckland, at the suggestion of his mentor John Dudley.

[4] Currently fibre-optic communications systems use hundreds of lasers with different wavelengths to increase the amount of information transmitted; a microresonator frequency comb could allow a single beam to do this work, greatly improving performance and energy efficiency.

[1] On 30 June 2020 Erkintalo was presented with the 2019 Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize for his contributions to new laser technologies.

Schematic depiction by Erkintalo of the generation of an optical frequency comb in a ring resonator
Miro Erkintalo in his lab at the University of Auckland , after winning the Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize