Samuel L. McCall

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Samuel Leverte McCall (born June 18, 1940 in Panama City , Florida , † October 18, 1995 ) was an American physicist who studied laser physics and nonlinear optics .

Life

McCall studied at Florida State University with a bachelor's degree in 1962 and at the University of California, Berkeley , where he received his doctorate in 1966 and, together with his teacher Erwin Hahn, discovered self-induced transparency: Laser pulses could propagate in a medium through non-linear interaction with it as if it were transparent if the pulses were only intense enough. McCall was a technician at the research laboratories of the Ford Motor Company in Sunnyvale , where he caught the eye of Hahn, who worked there as a consultant, who brought him to Berkeley as a student. After his dissertation, he went to Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill. McCall was there in the Low Energy Physics and Scattering department and was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff . He died of cancer in 1995.

At Bell Labs, he dealt both theoretically and experimentally with optical bistability, quantum interferometers and various semiconductor lasers suitable for integrated optics, such as distributed feedback lasers (DFB, semiconductor lasers with distributed Bragg gratings), semiconductor lasers with vertical resonators (vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, quantum well vertical cavity lasers), microdisk lasers, quantum wire lasers and with materials with a photonic band gap.

He also dealt early with adaptive optics in reflector telescopes and applied them to the study of supernovae.

McCall developed microdisk lasers with colleagues at Bell Laboratories in 1992. The work they published in Applied Physics Letters was one of the most cited papers on solid-state lasers. The active zone of the semiconductor laser was arranged around a pane like a whispering gallery .

In 1989 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1990 he received the Max Born Award for theoretical and experimental pioneering contributions to self-induced transparency and optical bistability .

Fonts

  • with Anthony FJ Levi, Richart Slusher , Stephen J. Pearton, Ralph A. Logan: Whispering gallery mode microdisk laser , Applied Physics Letters, Volume 60, 1992, p. 289
  • with PM Platzman: An optimized distributed feedback laser , IEEE J. Quantum Electronics, QE-21, 1985, pp. 1899-1904

literature

  • Richart Slusher, Philip Platzman, Erwin Hahn, Obituary, Physics Today, Volume 49, 1996, No. 6

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hahn and McCall: Self-Induced Transparency by Pulsed Coherent Light . In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 18, 1967, pp. 908-911
  2. ↑ Hahn, McCall Self-induced transparency , Phys. Rev., Vol. 183, 1969, p. 457
  3. ^ Hahn Oral History, AIP
  4. ↑ Quoted from Bell Lab News, April 2, 1990
personal data
SURNAME McCall, Samuel L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McCall, Samuel Leverte
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Panama City
DATE OF DEATH October 18, 1995