Charles Shank

Charles Vernon "Chuck" Shank (born July 12, 1943 in Mount Holly , New Jersey ) is an American physicist who deals with laser physics.

Shank studied at the University of California, Berkeley (Master's 1965), where he received his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1969. He then worked at Bell Laboratories , from 1976 as head of the quantum physics and electronics research department and from 1983 to 1989 as director of the electronics research laboratory. From 1989 to 2004 he was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . Since 2004 he has been professor of physics, chemistry, electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley.

With Erich P. Ippen he developed in the 1970s tunable dye laser and 1974, a passively mode-locked dye laser for generating ultrashort pulses (below 1 Piko -sec). Shank was a pioneer in the generation of ultra-short pulses and their application in femtosecond spectroscopy, with which he examined, among other things, chemical processes such as rhodopsin , which is important for photosynthesis . In 1971 he and Herwig Kogelnik developed the first distributed feedback laser .

In 1988 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1984), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986) and the National Academy of Engineering . In 1984 he received the George E. Pake Prize . He is the recipient of the RW Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America. In 1997 he and Erich P. Ippen received the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Physics . For 2014 he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize .

Fonts

• CV Shank, EP Ippen: Mode locking of dye lasers , in: Fritz Peter Schäfer (Ed.) Dye Lasers , Springer 1973, pp. 121-274.
• EP Ippen, CV Shank, A. Dienes: Passive mode locking of the cw dye laser , Appl. Phys. Lett. 21, 348 (1972).
• A. Dienes, EP Ippen, CV Shank: A mode-locked cw dye laser , Appl. Phys. Lett. 19: 258 (1971).
• H. Kogelnik, CV Shank: Coupled ‐ Wave Theory of Distributed Feedback Lasers , Journal of Applied Physics 43, 2327 (1972).
• Physics of Dye Lasers , Rev. Mod. Phys. 47, 649 (1975).

Web links

• Biography at the APS
• Website at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mode locking can be seen as a temporal analogue of the diffraction of light
2. ↑ Shank, Ippen Sub Picosecond Kilowatt Pulses from a mode locked cw dye laser , Applied Physics Letters Vol. 24, 1974, p.373 - pulses in the picosecond range were generated as early as 1966 (Anthony DeMaria and others) and the usability of mode-locked dye lasers for generation ultra-short pulse shown in 1968 by F. Schäfer and W.Schmidt.