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.
Roberto Merlin was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received his master's degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1973 and his doctorate from the University of Stuttgart in 1978. His graduate advisor was Professor Manuel Cardona. After a postdoctoral position in the group of Professor Miles V. Klein at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he joined the Physics faculty of the University of Michigan in 1980. [1]
In 1985 he was promoted to associate professor, and then professor in 1989. From 1993 to 1996, Merlin served as Associate Chair for Research and Facilities of the Department of Physics. In 2000, he received a joint appointment to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. [1] He is now the director of the Optical Physics Interdisciplinary Laboratory. [2]
Merlin is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, the von Humboldt Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2006 he received the Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids from the American Physical Society. [1] He received the Ellis R. Lippincott Award in 2017. [3]
Merlin does a variety of interdisciplinary work, mostly related to condensed matter physics. He has done research on Raman spectroscopy, rare-earth magnet semiconductors, superconductors, superlattices, ultrafast lasers, intercalated graphite, and negative refraction. [4]
Arthur Leonard Schawlow was an American physicist who, along with Charles Townes, developed the theoretical basis for laser science. His central insight was the use of two mirrors as the resonant cavity to take maser action from microwaves to visible wavelengths. He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work using lasers to determine atomic energy levels with great precision.
Federico Capasso is an Italian-American applied physicist and is one of the inventors of the quantum cascade laser during his work at Bell Laboratories. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University.
Edward Leamington Nichols was an American scientist. He was a physicist and astronomer, professor of physics at Cornell University.
Professor Ctirad Uher is the C. Wilbur Peters Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Born in Prague, Czech Republic, he graduated from the University of New South Wales, Australia in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. from there in 1979.
The University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, considered the largest institute for optics education in the United States, is dedicated to research and education in optics with an emphasis on optical engineering. The college offers more than 90 courses in optical sciences, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Optical Sciences and Engineering, Masters and Doctoral degree programs in Optical Sciences, as well as a dual master's degree in Optical Sciences and Business Administration. The college also offers comprehensive distance learning courses leading to a Professional Graduate Certificate or a master's degree and markets non-credit short courses on DVD to optics professionals.
Robert Louis Byer is a physicist. He was president of the Optical Society of America in 1994 and of the American Physical Society in 2012.
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.
Andrea Alù is an Italian American scientist and engineer, currently Einstein Professor of Physics at The City University of New York Graduate Center. He is known for his contributions to the fields of optics, photonics, plasmonics, and acoustics, most notably in the context of metamaterials and metasurfaces. He has co-authored over 650 journal papers and 35 book chapters, and he holds 11 U.S. patents.
Harrison McAllister Randall was an American physicist whose leadership from 1915 to 1941 brought the University of Michigan to international prominence in experimental and theoretical physics.
Timothy A. McKay is an astrophysicist and the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. He is actively involved in physics education, including courses on “Physics for the Life Sciences” and Saturday Morning Physics. As of 2013, McKay's papers have over 30,000 citations and an h-index of 66. He considers publication and education vital to the scientific enterprise: “science isn’t science until you’ve shared it with someone else.”
Carl William Akerlof is an American particle physicist and astrophysicist. A professor of physics at the University of Michigan, Akerlof initiated and led the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE), a ground-breaking effort to find fast astrophysical optical transients, particularly gamma-ray bursts. Akerlof has co-authored over 400 papers with 1500 collaborators, which have been cited over 6000 times. He was elected in 1993 a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).
Homer Alfred Neal was an American particle physicist and a distinguished professor at the University of Michigan. Neal was president of the American Physical Society in 2016. He was also a board member of Ford Motor Company, a council member of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a director of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation. Neal was the interim President of the University of Michigan in 1996. Neal's research group works as part of the ATLAS experiment hosted at CERN in Geneva.
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.
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.
Jean-Pierre Leburton is the Gregory E. Stillman Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. He is also a full-time faculty member in the Nanoelectronics and Nanomaterials group of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He is known for his work on semiconductor theory and simulation, and on nanoscale quantum devices including quantum wires, quantum dots, and quantum wells. He studies and develops nanoscale materials with potential electronic and biological applications.
Min Naiben, also known as Nai-Ben Ming, was a Chinese materials scientist, physicist, and politician. He was a Standing Committee member of the 9th Central Committee of the Jiusan Society and vice-president of the 10th and 11th Central Committee of the Jiusan Society.
Henriette D. Elvang is a Theoretical Particle Physicist and Professor at the University of Michigan. She works on quantum field theory and scattering processes.
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Randy Alan Bartels is an American investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research and a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has been awarded the Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship in physics, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE). In 2020 and 2022, he received support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to develop microscope technologies for imaging tissues and cells.
Hailin Wang is a physicist on the faculty of the University of Oregon who researches experimental condensed matter physics. He studies optical interactions in artificially engineered semiconductor nanostructures. His interests also include "quantum optics with spins, excitons, and nanomechanical oscillators, quantum information processing."