Daily News Briefs

Wilks Enterprise Inc., of South Norwalk, Conn., announced it has been awarded US Patent 6,420,708.B2 for a spectroscopy analyzer using a detector array and linear variable filter (LVF). The company is developing a variable filter array spectrometer based on the patent in partnership with thin-film optical coatings and components maker Optical Coating Corp. of Natick, Mass., and IR Microsystems of Lausanne, Switzerland, a maker of infrared detection subsystems and spectrometry subsystems based on LVF technology. Wilks Enterprise, which recently merged with Optical Coating Corp., makes analytical instruments for on-site analyses and in-line sensors for process control measurements. . . . Philadelphia-based Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials (formerly Shipley Co.) has announced that Grandmake Technology Ltd. (GMT), of Hong Kong, will distribute Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials Circuit Board Technologies' dry film imaging equipment in China and Hong Kong. . . . Federico Capasso, a professor of applied physics and a senior research fellow in electrical engineering at Harvard University, has won the 2004 Caterina Tomassoni and Felice Pietro Chisesi prize for his "contributions to the development of the so-called bandgap engineering, and in particular, for his pioneering work on the quantum laser that represents one of the most important developments in laser physics." The $15,000 prize, awarded by the University of Rome "La Sapienza" physics department, will be presented April 7 at the university. Capasso has been widely honored for his interdisciplinary research in fields such as materials research, solid-state physics, electronics and photonics. He is best known for his groundbreaking work on nanostructured materials and devices and for his co-invention of the quantum cascade laser at Bell Labs. He received a doctor of physics degree from the University of Rome in 1973. After doing research in fiber optics at Fondazione Bordoni in Rome, he joined Bell Labs in 1976; he became a faculty member at Harvard's Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences in January 2003.