Pioneers in Photonics

Radiation pressure exerted by light was a lifelong passion for Arthur Ashkin. He foresaw that light pressure could do useful work and invented the optical tweezers that can trap microscopic objects, from small ‘living things’ down to individual atoms.

Jonathan P. Dowling, who died in June, was a pioneer in quantum optics and one of the founders of the US government’s research programme in quantum information.

Philip Warren Anderson is one of the founding fathers of modern condensed-matter physics. With his death on 29 March 2020, we have lost one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century.

Evgeny Dianov (1936–2019) was a pioneer of fibre-optics research in the former Soviet Union and director of a highly successful research centre in Moscow dedicated to the field.

Father of the semiconductor laser, Nobel Prize laureate and director of the Ioffe Institute in St Petersburg, Zhores Alferov was a much-loved scientist and educator whose research changed the modern world.

Yaron Silberberg of the Weizmann Institute in Israel passed away in April. Here, some of his former students and friends remind us of who Yaron was: a creative researcher and a mentor without ego with major achievements in nonlinear optics, microscopy and quantum physics.

As a pioneer in the research on ultra-high-quality dielectric microresonators and their applications in nonlinear optics, frequency metrology and laser science, Mikhail Gorodetsky is badly missed.

Charles Townes, the Nobel laureate acclaimed for his pioneering work on lasers and nonlinear optics, sadly passed away in January this year. Here I offer personal reflections of working with him as one of his graduate students.

Nicolaas Bloembergen made rich contributions to nuclear magnetic resonance, masers and lasers, nonlinear optics and ultrafast laser–matter interactions. The Nobel laureate sadly passed away on 5 September 2017. Here are my memories of my Harvard mentor, a remarkable person and a wonderful scientist.

Optical fibre technology transformed telecommunications, leading to the global broadband Internet, and beyond. Charles Kuen Kao is the father of optical fibre communications whose vision changed the world.

Osamu Shimomura’s 90-year life came to an end on 19 October 2018. Throughout his long and exceedingly fruitful career, the Japanese marine biologist and chemist passionately explored the phenomenon of bioluminescence in living organisms, earning a Nobel Prize in the process.

Victor Georgievich Veselago (1929–2018), a Russian scientist from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, provided great inspiration and impetus to the field of metamaterials with his theoretical analysis of materials with a negative index of refraction.

The 2005 Nobel laureate, Roy Jay Glauber, sadly passed away on 26 December 2018 at the age of 93. He was highly regarded for his work on the quantum theory of coherence, as well as for his contributions to nuclear physics, scattering theory and statistical mechanics.

Emil Wolf died in June 2018 at the age of 95. The father of optical coherence theory was at the University of Rochester for nearly 60 years. A memorial in August at the university attracted more than 150 attendees from around the world.

John Love, co-author of the famous book Optical Waveguide Theory, passed away on 19 June 2016. The Australian optics community has lost a founding pillar.

Ronald Drever may be most famous for co-founding the LIGO project and his gravitational-wave research, but his contributions to laser stabilization have had broad impact on the photonics community.