Marlan Scully

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Marlan Orvil Scully (born August 3, 1939 in Casper , Wyoming ) is an American physicist who mainly deals with theoretical quantum optics .

Life

Scully attended the University of Wyoming ( bachelor's degree in physics engineering) and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute , received his master's degree from Willis Lamb at Yale University , where he received his PhD in 1965 . He was then an instructor at Yale, assistant and associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and became a professor at the University of Arizona in 1968 , where he set up the Optical Sciences Center with Lamb and others. From 1980 he was at the same time at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and as a professor at the University of New Mexico . In 1992 he went to Texas A&M University , where he is director of the Center for Theoretical Physics (from 1995) and the Institute for Quantum Studies. He was also co-director of the Texas Laser Laboratory at the Houston Advanced Research Center at The Woodlands. After he was visiting professor at Princeton University in 2003 , he accepted a professorship there in 2005, at the same time as that at Texas A&M.

Scully is a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academia Europaea . In 1970 he became a Sloan Research Fellow . In 1975 he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1977 of the American Physical Society . Since 1982 he has been an "External Scientific Member" of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics . Scully received the Charles Hard Townes Award from the Optical Society of America (OSA) in 1998, the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Physics from the American Physical Society (APS), the Adolph E. Lomb Medal from the OSA, the Elliot Cresson Medal from Franklin Institute (1990), the Quantum Electronics Award of the IEEE (2003), was a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Alexander von Humboldt Distinguished Faculty Prize. He was a Loeb Lecturer at Harvard University . In 2011 he received the Herbert Walther Prize and in 2012 the Frederic Ives Medal .

He is married and has three sons.

Patrick A. Lee and Wolfgang Schleich are among his PhD students .

plant

With Lamb, Scully developed a quantum theory of the laser ("Scully-Lamb theory"), with which the photon statistics and line widths of the laser could be successfully described. He also worked on the theory of the free electron laser and the use of lasers in tests of general relativity. In the 1990s, he applied the theoretical methods he developed to describe the laser to Bose-Einstein condensates . He also deals with fundamentals of quantum mechanics , such as the "Quantum Eraser Effect" ( quantum eraser ) of Scully and Drühl 1982. Take in an interference "a common source, the experiment photons entangled " are two different ways and is for it. B. marked by polarization which way you have taken, there is no more interference. However, if the marking is removed again ( erased ), it occurs again.

Scully also works experimentally (similar to his teacher Lamb), e.g. B. in applications of coherent Raman spectroscopy for the detection of anthrax spores and poison gases. Scully and colleagues made the first lasers work without population inversion (“Lasing without Inversion”, LWI). The principle is to enable several paths to the excited state of the laser transition, which are prepared in such a way that the amplitudes overlap and cancel each other out. There is no absorption in the excited state of the laser and laser operation by stimulated emission is possible with much lower pump power. In addition, applications for the construction of lasers with very short wavelengths (X-ray lasers) are expected. The effect is called " Electromagnetically Induced Transparency " (EIT) because the medium (phase-coherent and therefore called "Phaseonium" by Scully, for the associated laser he coined the name "Phaser") becomes transparent for the laser light.

As a further application of the EIT effect, Scully and colleagues demonstrated extreme slowing down (to group speeds of 90 m / s) of laser light in hot ( rubidium- atom) gases in 1999 . Such an extreme slowing down is based on the dependence of the group speed on the variation of the refractive index with the frequency, which is particularly strong with the EIT effect. In the case of ultra-cold gases (Bose-Einstein condensate), such an extreme slowdown had already been shown by physicists such as Lene Hau and Stephen Harris.

Scully also studied cattle production and is a cattle breeder himself, a combination of research interests that has earned him the occasional title "Quantum Cowboy".

Fonts

  • with Robert Scully: The Demon and the Quantum: From the Pythagorean Mystics to Maxwell's Demon and Quantum Mystery . Wiley-VCH, 2007
  • with M. Suhail Zubairy: Quantum Optics . Cambridge University Press 1997, ISBN 0521435951
  • with Willis Lamb and Murray Sargent: Laser Physics . Addison-Wesley, 1974
  • with Willis Lamb, Wolfgang Schleich, Charles Townes: Laser physics- quantum controversy in action, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 71, 1999, pp. 263–273 (in the Millennium Edition by Rev.Mod.Phys.)
  • From lasers and masers to phaseonium and phasers , Physics Reports, Volume 219, 1992, pp. 191–201 (anthology for the 20th Solvay conference on quantum optics)

literature

Web links

References

  1. ↑ see the MPI Quantenoptik page at https://www.mpq.mpg.de/4937538/external
  2. ^ Scully and Lamb: Quantum theory of an optical Maser . In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 16, 1966, p. 853, Quantum Theory of an optical Maser . Part 1-5, In: Physical Review . Volume 159, 1967, p 208, vol 166, 1968, p 246, vol 179, 1969, p 368, Physical Review A . Volume 2, 1970, p 2529 (with Kim), S. 2534 (with Kim), Part 6 of Lamb, Wang, Physical Review A . Volume 8, 1973, p. 866
  3. ^ Scully, P. Meystre, F. Hopf and W. Louisell: Classical theory of the free electron laser . In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 37, 1976, p. 1215
  4. ↑ Scully and Drühl: In: Physical Review A . Vol. 25, 1982, p. 2208; Scully, BG Englert and H. Walther: In: Nature . Volume 351, 1991, p. 111
  5. ↑ Scully and Fleischhauer: Lasing without Inversion . In: Science . Volume 263, 1994, p. 337, Padmabandu, Welch, Lukin, Nikonov, Shubin, Fry and Scully: Laser oscillation without population inversion in a sodium atomic beam . In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 76, 1996, p. 2553
  6. ↑ The idea comes from Stephen E. Harris in 1989
  7. ^ SE Harris: Electromagnetically Induced Transparency . In: Physics Today . July 1997
  8. ↑ Scully, Michail Lukin, George Welch, Alexander Zibrov and a .: Ultra-Slow Light and Enhanced Nonlinear Optical Effects in a coherently driven hot atomic gas . 1999, quant-ph / 9904031
  9. ↑ Hau, Harris, Dutton and Behroozi: In: Nature . Volume 397, 1999, p. 594
personal data
SURNAME Scully, Marlan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Scully, Marlan Orvil (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH August 3, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Casper , Wyoming