TMOS PhD student Fedor Kovalev was today awarded the coveted Robert & Helen Crompton Award at the Australian National University Research School of Physics Founders Day celebrations.

This award will support Fedor’s visit to TMOS Partner Investigator Prof. Andrea Alu at City University of New York later this year, where he will continue his work developing metasurfaces, a relatively new technology that has the potential to ease the pressure on telecommunication networks caused by the increased data needs of internet-connected home devices.

Kovalev is developing a parametric amplification approach that enables time-varying metasurfaces to convert incident electromagnetic waves to higher frequencies than the pump frequency , a key requirement of ‘beyond 6G’ communication networks.

The international collaboration supported by the award aims to confirm modeling results experimentally, share ideas, propose a new time-varying metasurface, resulting in a joint publication and potentially even a metadevice proposal that can be patented.
Kovalev says, “I’m incredibly appreciative of this opportunity, and I thank Robert and Helen for their generosity. The award will help me build a strong professional network, gain access to new ideas and technologies, and explore new research opportunities.

TMOS Chief Investigator and supervisor of Kovalev, Ilya Shadrivov, says, “Fedor is a talented researcher whose work shows exceptional promise. He has established multiple fruitful collaborations over the past two years, and he will greatly benefit from receiving this award.”

The Robert and Helen Crompton Award is funded by The Robert and Helen Crompton Endowment Fund. Emeritus Professor Robert Crompton, an ANU physicist for over 40 years, and his wife Helen established this endowment to provide support for outstanding physics students. It is the intention of the ANU Research School and the Crompton family that the fund is used to enhance career opportunities and experience of students.

This generous award enables RSPhys HDR students to undertake part of the research program overseas or make a collaborative visit to an overseas institution, for 3 to 6 months.

Director of the ANU Research School of Physics, Tim Senden, says, “Robert and Helen were as passionate about developing new scientists as they were about the new science itself. This award has ensured that their scientific legacy reaches beyond Bob’s work on electron swarm physics into many other fields of physics, now including metasurfaces.”

For more information about Kovalev’s research, please email connect@tmos.org.au