Arthur Ashkin

Arthur Ashkin ( born September 2, 1922 in New York City ) is an American experimental physicist.

Life

Ashkin grew up in Brooklyn and studied at Columbia College (Bachelor 1947). His studies he interrupted from 1942 to 1946 to work at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a radar technician. In 1952 he received his doctorate from Cornell University. From 1952 he was at Bell Laboratories, where he retired in 1992. He then worked on in his own laboratory. From 1963 to 1987 he was Head of Laser Physics at Bell Laboratories.

He is considered the father of the Optical trapping, the principle to build atom traps with lasers, and optical tweezers. Among other things, it was his colleague Steven Chu, with whom he worked, the Nobel Prize. First experiments led to Ashkin 1967 from: he showed how small latex beads (diameter in the micrometer range ) move with lasers and also was able to capture. The trapping of atoms then succeeded by the development of optical cooling techniques ( by Theodor Hänsch, Arthur Schawlow, John L. Hall and others) the group of Ashkin and Chu mid-1980s. Ashkin turned the optical tweezers as a result of biological objects.

Ashkin also worked on nonlinear optics, for example, in glass fibers.

Since 1996 he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering ( 1984). He is an honorary member of the Optical Society of America and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1998 he received the Frederic Ives Medal.

His brother Julius Ashkin was also a physicist.

Writings

• Optical trapping and manipulation of neutral particles using lasers, World Scientific 2006