Masataka Nakazawa

Masataka Nakazawa ( Japanese 中 沢 正隆 , Nakazawa Masataka ; born September 17, 1952 in Yamanashi Prefecture ) is a Japanese physicist .

Life

Nakazawa received his Bachelor of Science degree in electronics from Kanazawa University in 1975 . Subsequently, in 1977, he did a Master of Science in physical electronics and a doctorate in applied electronics from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1980. His dissertation was on frequency stabilization of a helium-neon laser with an external absorption cell. He then did research at NTT at the Ibaraki Electrical Communication Laboratory, where he became group leader for nonlinear transmission in 1989. In 1984/85 he was a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the group for picosecond optics and quantum electronics. In 1999 he became an NTT Fellow.

After he was visiting professor there from 1999 to 2001, he became professor at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tōhoku University in 2001 , of which he has been director since 2010. He is the author and co-author of more than 410 scientific articles (as of 2013).

He is a pioneer of optical solitons in high speed optical communication in fiber optic networks and of rare earth doped optical amplifiers (such as EDFA). He also deals with the generation of laser pulses in the femtosecond range. For example, he developed a 10 GHz femtosecond - fiber laser as a source of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) in optical communication, for which he received an IEICE Paper Award 1998 (IEICE is the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers in Tokyo), and transferred 1.28 terabits / Second with optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) over 70 km (for which he received the IEICE Inose Award in 2002).

Nakazawa holds more than 100 patents , and a further 120 patent applications are still pending (as of 2013).

For 2014 he was awarded the Charles Hard Townes Award . He became a Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 1992 and the IEEE in 1995 for contributions to high-speed communication using optical solitons with EDFA, femtosecond laser pulses, and nonlinear optics. He is a Fellow of IEICE, the Optical Society of Japan, the Laser Society of Japan, and the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP). In 2010 he received the IEEE Quantum Electronics Award for developing compact EDFAs. In 2005 he received the RW Wood Prize .

Web links

• CV of Nakazawa (English)
• List of publications

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dither-free, absolute frequency stabilization of a 3.39 µm He-Ne laser using a CH4 saturated absorption in an external cell