Optica is a professional society of individuals and companies with an interest in optics and photonics. It publishes journals and organizes conferences and exhibitions. It currently has about 488,000 customers in 183 countries, including nearly 300 companies.
Naomi J. Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry and physics at Rice University. She is also the founding director of Rice University Laboratory for Nanophotonics, and the Smalley-Curl Institute. She invented the first nanoparticle with tunable plasmonic resonances, which are controlled by their shape and structure, and has won numerous awards for her pioneering work in the field of nanophotonics and plasmonics. She was also part of a team that developed the first dark pulse soliton in 1987 while working for IBM.
Marvin Lou Cohen is an American–Canadian theoretical physicist. He is a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Cohen is a leading expert in the field of condensed matter physics. He is widely known for his seminal work on the electronic structure of solids.
Paul Aimé Fleury is an American physicist and academic administrator. He was the dean of the faculty of engineering at Yale University and is the Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Engineering and Applied Physics and professor of physics.
Vladimir (Vlad) M. Shalaev is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Scientific Director for Nanophotonics at Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University.
The Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics is awarded annually, in even years by the American Chemical Society and in odd years by the American Physical Society. The award is meant to recognize and encourage outstanding interdisciplinary research in chemistry and physics, in the spirit of Irving Langmuir. A nominee must have made an outstanding contribution to chemical physics or physical chemistry within the 10 years preceding the year in which the award is made. The award will be granted without restriction, except that the recipient must be a resident of the United States.
David Erik Aspnes is an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1998). Aspnes developed fundamental theories of the linear and nonlinear optical properties of materials and thin films, and the technology of spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE). SE is a metrology that is indispensable in the manufacture of integrated circuits.
Roberto D. Merlin is an Argentine physicist and Peter A. Franken Collegiate Professor of Physics and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He is known, among other things, for his work on quasiperiodic superlattices, squeezed phonons, and, most recently, for the discovery of "superfocusing", a method for creating lenses that can surpass the diffraction limit without using negative refraction materials.
Yuen-Ron Shen is a Chinese physicist. He is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his work on non-linear optics. He was born in Shanghai and graduated from National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard under physicist and Nobel Laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen in 1963, and joined the department of physics at Berkeley in 1964. In the early years, Shen was probably best known for his work on self-focusing and filament propagation of laser beams in materials. These fundamental studies enabled the creation of ultrafast supercontinuum light sources. In the 1970s and 1980s, he collaborated with Yuan T. Lee on the study of multiphoton dissociation of molecular clusters. The molecular-beam photofragmentation translational spectroscopy that they developed has clarified much of the initial confusion concerning the dynamics of infrared multiphoton dissociation processes. In the 1980s and 1990s, Shen developed various nonlinear optics methods for the study of material surfaces and interfaces. Among these techniques, second-harmonic generation and sum frequency generation spectroscopy are best known and now widely used by scientists from various fields. He has collaborated with Gabor Somorjai on the use of the technique of Sum Frequency Generation Spectroscopy to study catalyst surfaces. He is the author of the book The Principles of Nonlinear Optics. Shen belongs to the prolific J. J. Thomson academic lineage tree. Currently, Shen works in U. C. Berkeley and Fudan University in Shanghai.
Manuel Cardona Castro was a condensed matter physicist. According to the ISI Citations web database, Cardona was one of the eight most cited physicists since 1970. He specialized in solid state physics. Cardona's main interests were in the fields of: Raman scattering as applied to semiconductor microstructures, materials with tailor-made isotopic compositions, and high Tc superconductors, particularly investigations of electronic and vibronic excitations in the normal and superconducting state.
The EPS CMD Europhysics Prize is awarded since 1975 by the Condensed Matter Division of the European Physical Society, in recognition of recent work by one or more individuals, for scientific excellence in the area of condensed matter physics. It is one of Europe’s most prestigious prizes in the field of condensed matter physics. Several laureates of the EPS CMD Europhysics Prize also received a Nobel Prize in Physics or Chemistry.
Jan Tauc was a Czech-American physicist who introduced the concepts of Tauc gap and Tauc plot to the optical characterization of solids. Born in Bohemia, he emigrated to the United States in 1969, where he received citizenship in 1978, and worked for the rest of his life.
James R. Chelikowsky is a professor of physics, chemical engineering, chemistry and at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the director of the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences' Center for Computational Materials. He holds the W.A. "Tex" Moncrief Jr. Chair of Computational Materials.
Duncan G. Steel is an American experimental physicist, researcher and professor in quantum optics in condensed matter physics. He is the Robert J. Hiller Professor of Electrical Engineering, Professor of Physics, Professor of Biophysics, and Research Professor in the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Michigan. Steel is also a Guggenheim Scholar and a Fellow of American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He coedited the five-volume series on the Encyclopedia of Modern Optics.
Elias Burstein was an American experimental condensed matter physicist whose active career in science spanned seven decades. He is known for his pioneering fundamental research in the optical physics of solids; for writing and editing hundreds of articles and other publications; for bringing together scientists from around the world in international meetings, conferences, and symposia; and for training and mentoring dozens of younger physicists.
David A. B. Miller is the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he is also a professor of Applied Physics by courtesy. His research interests include the use of optics in switching, interconnection, communications, computing, and sensing systems, physics and applications of quantum well optics and optoelectronics, and fundamental features and limits for optics and nanophotonics in communications and information processing.
David Burnham Tanner is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and an affiliate professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida.
Peter J. Nordlander is a Swedish physicist.
Andrea Cavalleri is an Italian physicist who specializes in optical science and in condensed matter physics. He is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg, Germany and a professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. He was awarded the 2018 Frank Isakson Prize for his pioneering work on ultrafast optical spectroscopy applied to condensed matter systems.
