Daniel Frank Walls

Daniel Frank Walls ( * 1942 in New Zealand, † 12 May 1999 Auckland ) was a New Zealand theoretical physicist who dealt with quantum optics.

Walls studied physics at the University of Auckland in 1969 and his doctorate from Harvard University with Roy J. Glauber. As a post - graduate student he was in Auckland and Stuttgart and from 1972 Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, where he became professor in 1980. From 1987 he was professor of theoretical physics at the University of Auckland. He died at age 57 from cancer.

He was a leading theoretician of non-classical properties of light ( quantum optics). With his students, he said Howard Carmichael 1976 photon antibunching, and pointed the possibility of his generation (regardless of Leonard Mandel and others that the effect first observed in 1977 ) and he was a pioneer in the theory of Squeezed Light (literally Squeezed light) means light in which, for example, only very small amplitude fluctuations occur, but the phase fluctuates greatly ( by the uncertainty relation amplitude - phase) and vice versa.

He also made important contributions to quantum measuring process, for example, experiments by Schrodinger's cat type ( superposition of macroscopic wave functions ) and quantum Nondemolition -Measurements ( QND, non-destructive quantum measurement), originally proposed in the 1970s in gravitational wave experiments ( by Braginsky and others) transferred from Walls and others on quantum optics.

Later he dealt with Bose - Einstein condensates (BEC ) as the interference of quantized vortices and Josephson -coupled BEC.

In 1981 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and in 1992 the Royal Society. In 1990 he received the Einstein Prize for Laser Science and the 1995 Dirac Medal ( IOP). He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Writings

• Gerard J. Milburn Quantum Optics, Springer Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3642066764