John Madey

John MJ Madey (* 1943) is an American physicist. He led the team that built the first free electron laser ( FEL).

Madey studied at Caltech, with a bachelor's degree in physics at Alvin Tollestrup 1964. 1965 he made there his master's degree (formally in electrical engineering) in the laser pioneer Amnon Yariv. In 1971 he received his doctorate from Stanford University with William Fairbank Sr., where he developed a source of thermal positrons. As a student, he worked in the summer at Brookhaven National Laboratory in building the AGS synchrotron. After his doctorate, he was from 1971 on WW Hansen Laboratory at Stanford, where he invented the free electron laser and his team built up. In 1986, he received a research professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. In 1989 he went with his FEL Laboratory of Stanford at Duke University, where he led a project that developed a FEL in a storage ring FEL and director of the laboratory was. He left in 1997 in the dispute from Duke University. There was also a dispute, as the Duke University patents Madey used on. 2002 won Madey before the Court of Appeal, which also affected in the U.S. research community had, since the court stopped the hitherto common practice to use such patented inventions for non-commercial purposes in basic research. From 1998 he was professor of physics at the University of Hawaii. Here he turned to FEL laser for remote sensing.

In 1989 he received the Medal of the Franklin Institute Ballantine. He was awarded the 2012 Robert R. Wilson Prize.