Garrett Cole
Nelson E. Claytor Endowed Chair in Optical Sciences Associate Professor of Optical Sciences
Garrett D. Cole is Associate Professor and the inaugural Nelson E. Claytor Endowed Chair in Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. He completed his B.S. in Materials Engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2001 and obtained his Ph.D. in Electronic and Photonic Materials from UC Santa Barbara in 2005. He subsequently held positions including first employee of Aerius Photonics LLC (acquired by FLIR), postdoctoral staff member at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (headed by Anton Zeilinger, Nobel Prize in Physics 2022), and university assistant in the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna.
In 2012, Professor Cole founded Crystalline Mirror Solutions (CMS), a quantum optomechanics spin-off commercializing semiconductor supermirrors for laser-based metrology and manufacturing. CMS was successfully acquired by Thorlabs in December 2019 and rebranded as Thorlabs Crystalline Solutions.
In addition to numerous startup prizes, Professor Cole received the LIGHT2015 Young Photonics Entrepreneur Award, the Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis (2016), and the SPIE Prism Award (2017), and served as a UNESCO Trust Science Champion for the International Day of Light (2021). In 2024, he was selected as a member of the Photonics100 and elected a Fellow of Optica. His research spans quantum optomechanics, precision photonics, semiconductor laser technologies, photonic integration, and advanced optical materials for applications ranging from optical clocks and quantum sensing to gravitational-wave detection.
Research Interests
Quantum optomechanics and cavity optomechanical resonators
Semiconductor and solid-state laser technologies
Heterogeneous integration of photonic and optoelectronic systems
Crystalline mirrors for precision optical metrology, frequency stabilization, and optical clocks
Photonic technologies for gravitational-wave detection and quantum sensing