| Citation | Taylor’s unique contributions to tunable ultrafast lasers and nonlinear fibre optics have ranged from fundamental discoveries to ground-breaking technologies for telecommunications, medical imaging and remote sensing. He developed all but one of the femtosecond dye lasers, which allowed tunability throughout the visible spectrum. The femtosecond dye laser underpinned fundamental, ultrafast physical and chemical studies for over a decade. He also pioneered the first family of diode-pumped tunable, all-solid-state femtosecond systems in the near infra-red and visible. The compact nature of these sources led to commercialization and widespread use. His studies of fundamental nonlinear optical processes in fibres, and all-fibre integration with his master-oscillator power fibre amplifiers, have been seminal. They led him to develop the high power supercontinuum or “white light laser” source, which covers the complete transmission window of silica fibre. Its unprecedented spectral power density and wavelength versatility have facilitated the scientific and commercial success of the device, leading to its wide deployment from laboratory time-resolved dynamics to medical imaging. |