Professor Mike Kosch and Professor Janne Ruostekoski from Lancaster University have both received awards from The Institute of Physics.

The IOP is the professional body and learned society for physics, and the leading body for practising physicists in the UK and Ireland.

Professor Kosch has been awarded the Dennis Gabor Medal and Prize for image processing techniques, derived from pioneering auroral research, that have been deployed in hundreds of automated cameras for wildfire detection, realising huge savings in timber and CO2 emissions.

He said: "I am very pleased to receive this award and honoured to have my work recognised in this way. It clearly shows how blue skies research, specifically into the natural, artificial and black auroras in this case, has been translated into significant socio-economic benefit, thereby proving that blue-skies research always has great potential value."

Professor Ruostekoski, Chair in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, has been awarded the Joseph Thomson Medal and Prize for his outstanding contributions to the fundamental understanding of cooperative interactions between light and atomic ensembles, as well as for pioneering efforts in harnessing these interactions for applications.

He said: "I am honoured to receive this award and delighted that my work has been recognised. In collectively interacting systems, light can behave in peculiar ways. While the awarded studies are part of fundamental research, these effects can also contribute to the rapidly growing global significance of quantum physics in applications."

Congratulating this year’s Award winners, Institute of Physics President Professor Sir Keith Burnett said; “Today’s world faces many challenges which physics will play an absolutely fundamental part in addressing. Our award winners are in the vanguard of that work and each one has made a significant and positive impact in their profession. I hope they are incredibly proud of their achievements.”

Professor Kosch’s pioneering research into artificial auroras and locating distant, ill-defined moving objects led to his development of advanced image processing techniques. In 2011, he joined spin-out company EnviroVision Solutions (EVS) who integrated these techniques into multiple large networks of automated and strategically positioned cameras, in a system called ForestWatch®.

These have been used to rapidly detect, accurately geolocate and promptly report forest wildfires based on detecting smoke plumes up to 25 kilometres away. The physics-based detection relies on motion and spectral analysis using characteristics unique to smoke plumes, which also supresses multiple sources of false alarms.

His company has deployed over 340 camera systems so far around the world, mainly in South Africa and North America but also in Ghana and Australia, with trials underway in Chile, China, Indonesia, Greece and Spain. These have substantially reduced commercial forest wildfire losses and their associated global CO2 emissions.

In North America, it is estimated that ForestWatch systems have saved £1.6 billion in timber and 38 million tonnes of CO2, valued at £1.9 billion in the period 2014 to 2020.

Professor Ruostekoski has made pioneering and long-lasting theoretical contributions that have profoundly reshaped our fundamental understanding of cooperative interactions between light and atomic ensembles, demonstrating that collectively interacting systems can respond quite differently from conventional optical media.

He has pioneered the studies of atomic planar arrays cooperatively responding to light, showcasing their potential as quantum metasurfaces for manipulating and controlling light, leading to light-manipulating atomic planar arrays emerging as a forefront research area in quantum optics of atoms.

In the exploration of interactions of atoms with light, Professor Ruostekoski has pioneered powerful methods for utilising light in controlled engineering of topologically non-trivial defects, textures and energy landscapes for atoms. This work has not only inspired the atomic physics community but has also reached into photonics, and solid-state and elementary particle physics.

This framework of cooperative interactions between light and atomic ensembles has enabled him to extend the atomic concepts to universal settings, involving, for example, nanofabricated circuits interacting with electromagnetic fields, in which case giant, spatially extended subradiance was demonstrated in collaboration with researchers. These methods form a general, widely adapted framework that sheds light on the emergence of macroscopic electrodynamics from microscopic principles at the atomic level.