Lene Hau, McKay professor of applied physics and professor of physics, received a MacArthur Fellowship yesterday for her work on manipulating light. The “genius grant” entitles her to receive $500,000 over a period of five years, which she can spend as she pleases.

“[When I got the call] the program director asked if I was sitting down,” Hau said. “Luckily, I was.”

“It took me several hours after I heard the news for it to sink in. It is such a tremendous honor,” she said.

The MacArthur Foundation does not interview nominees, and the winners are notified only when the final decision is made.

Hau’s colleagues said they were thrilled to hear of her award.

“I was really, really excited,” said Venkatesh Narayanamurti, dean of engineering and applied sciences. “It’s a very nice prize. It’s really reserved for unusual people.”

Hau received a Ph.D from the University of Aarhus, Denmark in 1991 and worked at the Rowland Institute before moving to Harvard in 1999.

For the past few years, she has led a research team which worked on slowing light to a stop by using atoms cooled to several billionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Usually, any information contained in a light beam is destroyed when its photons are absorbed by atoms. In Hau’s research, the information is preserved, and can be converted back into a light beam through the use of lasers.

This “storage” process does not effect the properties of the light beam, making it potentially invaluable in processing and storing optical information.

“It’s very early in the field, but I certainly hope that [the research] will turn out to be very important,” Hau said.

Although Hau’s graduate training focused on the theoretical aspects of physics, some of her most recent projects have involved practical application.

She has been experimenting in nanotechnology, trying to take “a lab full of optics and optical gizmos, and squeeze it onto a chip.”

She has recently been in discussion with the Danish photonics company NKT about other possible uses for her research.

When asked what she would do with the money, Hau said it was still too early to tell.