Laser physics and nonlinear optics

Hubert Heffner

Hubert Heffner (1924–1975) was an American applied physicist at Stanford University who worked on microwave devices and quantum electronics, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Hyotcherl Ihee

Hyotcherl Ihee (이효철) is a South Korean chemist, a KAIST professor since 2003 and founding director of the IBS Center for Advanced Reaction Dynamics, known for time-resolved X-ray liquidography.

Ian Coddington is a physicist at NIST in Boulder, Colorado, known as a pioneer of dual-comb spectroscopy, whose open-path laser instruments measure methane and other trace gases for emissions monitoring.

Igor Aharonovich

Igor Aharonovich is an Australian-based physicist and professor at the University of Technology Sydney who leads a quantum nanophotonics laboratory studying single-photon emitters in wide-bandgap materials.

J. Gary Eden

J. Gary Eden is an American electrical engineer and applied physicist at the University of Illinois, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014 for microplasma technologies and excimer lasers.

Jacob B. Khurgin

Jacob B. Khurgin, also published as J. B. Khurgin, is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University, known for work on optics, plasmonics, and nonlinear optical materials.

James J. Wynne

James J. Wynne is an American physicist at IBM Research, born in Brooklyn, New York, best known as co-discoverer of excimer laser surgery, which underlies LASIK and PRK refractive procedures.

James Power Gordon

James Power Gordon (1928–2013) was an American physicist who built the first maser as a doctoral student at Columbia University, then worked on optical communication at Bell Labs.

Jason W. Fleischer

Jason W. Fleischer is an American physicist and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University, known for the first observation of two-dimensional discrete solitons.

Jens Biegert

Jens Biegert is a German physicist working in attoscience and ultrafast optics at ICFO in Barcelona, where he has been a tenured professor and ICREA Research Professor since 2007.

Jianwei Miao

Jianwei (John) Miao is a UCLA physicist who pioneered coherent diffraction imaging in 1999 and atomic electron tomography in 2012, lensless methods that determine structure from diffraction patterns and algorithms.

Oct 10, 2026

John Kerr (physicist)

John Kerr (1824–1907) was a Scottish physicist and mathematical lecturer in Glasgow who discovered the electro-optic Kerr effect in 1875 and the magneto-optic Kerr effect.

Jorge J. Rocca

Jorge J. Rocca is an Argentine-born laser physicist and University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, known for the first table-top soft X-ray laser and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024.

Joseph W. Perry

Joseph W. Perry (1955–2022) was an American physical chemist and Georgia Tech professor known for two-photon absorption, optical limiting, and 3D microfabrication, and a 1999 Nature paper.

Laura Herz

Laura Herz (Laura M. Herz) is a semiconductor photophysicist and Professor of Physics at Oxford, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and awarded the 2024 Michael Faraday Medal.

Lea Nienhaus

Lea Nienhaus is a chemist known for solid-state perovskite-sensitized photon upconversion, turning infrared light into visible light; she has been an associate professor at Rice University since 2024.

Lluís Torner

Lluís Torner (born 1961) is a Catalan physicist in optics and photonics who founded and directed the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona from 2002.

Martin M. Fejer

Martin M. Fejer is a Stanford professor of applied physics known for quasi-phase-matched nonlinear optics and microstructured ferroelectrics, and for LIGO coatings research; he joined the National Academy of Sciences in 2016.

Michal Lipson

Michal Lipson is a physicist and pioneer of silicon photonics, the Eugene Higgins Professor at Columbia University, known for slot waveguides and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010.

Mordechai Segev

Mordechai (Moti) Segev is an Israeli physicist and distinguished professor at the Technion in Haifa, credited with founding topological photonics, Anderson localization of light, and photorefractive solitons.

Nicolaas Bloembergen

Nicolaas Bloembergen (1920–2017) was a Dutch-born American physicist at Harvard, known for the three-level solid state maser and nonlinear optics, who shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for laser spectroscopy.

Peter Baum

Peter Baum is a professor of experimental physics at the University of Konstanz who pioneered attosecond electron microscopy, earning ERC grants and the 2022 Falling Walls prize.

Peter F. Moulton

Peter F. Moulton is an American laser physicist and engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory who invented the Ti:sapphire tunable solid-state laser in 1982 and belongs to the National Academy of Engineering.

Peter Günter

Peter Günter is a Swiss physicist in nonlinear optics who led ETH Zurich's Nonlinear Optics Laboratory until his 2010 retirement and is best known for the organic electro-optic crystal DAST.

Peter Sorokin

Peter Sorokin (1931–2015) was an American physicist at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center who co-invented the organic dye laser in 1966, a laser tunable over a broad wavelength range.

Robert Hellwarth

Robert Hellwarth (1930–2021) was an American physicist and electrical engineer who invented Q-switching, which raises a laser's peak power a millionfold, and developed optical phase conjugation.

Robert L. Byer

Robert L. Byer is an American applied physicist at Stanford University known for laser science and nonlinear optics, including the diode-pumped YAG laser that forms LIGO's main beams.

Robert W. Boyd

Robert W. Boyd is an American physicist in nonlinear optics and quantum photonics, a professor at Rochester and Ottawa known for slow and fast light research.

Oct 10, 2026

Roy Taylor (British laser physicist)

Roy Taylor, full name James Roy Taylor, is a British laser physicist and Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London, known for supercontinuum "white light" fiber sources.