She was also part of a team that developed the first dark pulse soliton in 1987 while working for IBM.
Her current research at Rice University focuses on studying light-matter interaction in plasmonic nanoparticles for applications in chemical sensing, biomedical sciences, catalysis, and energy.
[5] She was a graduate research fellow at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center during her doctoral studies, during which time she developed the first "dark pulse" soliton with Dieter Kroekel, Giampiero Giuliani and Daniel Grischkowsky.
She was also part of the first research efforts focusing on time-domain terahertz spectroscopy during her time at IBM.
[8] Halas' work in the 21st century focuses on noble metal nanoshells covering semiconducting or insulating cores.