Marin SoljaÄić
Marin Soljacic ( born February 7, 1974 in Zagreb) is a Croatian physicist and electrical engineer who works in the field of nonlinear optics and is known for the development of efficient wireless power transmission over short distances with electromagnetic fields.
Soljacic went to Zagreb to school and studied with a scholarship from the University at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics and electrical engineering with a bachelor's degree in 1996. Afterwards, he went on to Princeton University, for his Masters degree where he graduated in 1998 and 2000 in physics at Mordechai Segev received his doctorate. From 2000, he worked as a research fellow at MIT Pappalardo, from 2003 as a Principal Research Scientist in the Laboratory for Electronics. He was an Assistant Professor at MIT in 2005.
Soljacic works both as a theorist and experimentally. He is known for innovation and research in the field of wireless energy transfer to electromagnetic fields. In contrast to the well-known experiments of Nikola Tesla in the early 20th century, which proved to be ineffective, he uses strongly coupled magnetic resonance over short distances. He demonstrated in 2007 the energy transfer with 60 W light bulb over a distance of 2 m ( with an efficiency of 40%). For the development of marketable products, he founded the company WiTricity ( wireless electricity for ).
He also conducts research on nonlinear optics and micro-and nano-structured optical materials and photonic crystals. He demonstrated non-linear phenomena such as fractals, pattern formation and self- stabilizing solitons in nonlinear optics ( for example Necklace solitons ). He developed in 2005 a controllable by a single photon optical switch with TY (electrically induced transparency ) materials in photonic crystals. 2000 he predicted theoretically, that laser with sufficient power via the pair generation of particles in a vacuum and the resulting non-linear interaction can exhibit self-focusing effects. In 2009 he developed with his group optical waveguides, which act as a rectifier ( Photonic chiral edge states in photonic crystals ) with ideas from the theory of the quantum Hall effect were transferred
In 2008 he was MacArthur Fellow. In 2005 he was awarded the Adolph Lomb Medal.