Marlan Scully
Marlan Orvil Scully ( born August 3, 1939 in Casper, Wyoming) is an American physicist who mainly deals with theoretical quantum optics.
Life
Scully attended the University of Wyoming (Bachelor as a physics engineer) and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, received his master's degree at Willis Lamb at Yale University, where he received his doctorate in 1965. He was then instructor at Yale, Assistant and Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in 1968 professor at the University of Arizona, where he built the Optial Sciences Center with Lamb and others. From 1980 he was also at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and a professor at the University of New Mexico. In 1992 he went to Texas A & M University, where he is director of the Center for Theoretical Physics (from 1995) and the Institute for Quantum Studies. He was co -director of the Texas Laser Laboratory, Houston Advanced Research Center in The Woodlands as well. After visiting professor at Princeton University, he was back in 2003, he took there in 2005, a professor at the same time as the at Texas A & M.
Scully is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europaea and the Max Planck Society. He received the Charles Townes Award of the Optical Society of America ( OSA) in 1998, the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser - Physics of the American Physical Society ( APS), which Adolph E. Lomb Medal of the OSA, the Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute ( 1990), the Quantum Electronics Award of the IEEE (2003), Guggenheim Fellow and received the Alexander von Humboldt Distinguished Faculty Prize. He was Loeb Lecturer at Harvard University. In 2011 he received the Herbert Walther Award and the 2012 Frederic Ives Medal.
He is married and has three sons.
His doctoral include Patrick A. Lee and Wolfgang Schleich.
Work
Scully developed with Lamb a quantum theory of the laser ( "Scully - Lamb theory" ), with the photon statistics and linewidth of the laser could be described successfully. He also worked on the theory of free-electron laser and the use of lasers in tests of general relativity. In the 1990s, he turned the he developed theoretical methods for the description of the laser also on Bose -Einstein condensates. He also deals with the foundations of quantum mechanics, such as the " Quantum Eraser Effect" ( quantum eraser ) by Scully and Drühl 1982. Companies in an interference experiment photons from a common source, the " entangled" are two different ways and will be, for as marked by polarization which path they have taken, there occurs no more interference. If the marker but again eliminated ( erased ), it occurs again.
Scully works well ( much like his teacher Lamb) experimentally, eg in applications of coherent Raman spectroscopy for the detection of anthrax spores and toxic gases. Scully brought with colleagues the first lasers without population inversion on Running ( " lasing without inversion", LWI). The principle consists in several ways to the excited state of the laser transition to make, which are prepared so that overlap the amplitude and offset. There is no absorption in the excited state, rather than the laser, and laser operation by stimulated emission is possible at much lower pump power. In addition to applications for the construction of lasers with very short wavelengths ( X-ray ) expects. The effect is called " Electromagnetically induced transparency " (EIT, electromagnetically induced Transparency ), since the medium (phase - coherent and therefore called Scully " Phaseonium " for the associated laser he coined the name " Phaser " ) is transparent to the laser light.
As a further application of the EIT with Scully in 1999 with colleagues demonstrated extreme slowdown (on group velocities of 90 m / s) of laser light in hot ( rubidium atom) gases. Such extreme slowdown comes from the dependence of the group velocity of the variation of the refractive index with frequency, which is especially strong in the EIT effect. In ultracold gases ( Bose -Einstein condensate ) such an extreme slowdown previously by physicists such as Lene Hau, S. Harris had been shown.
Scully also examined the cattle production and is itself cattleman, a combination of research interests, which earned him the occasional titling " Quantum Cowboy".
Writings
- With Robert Scully: The Demon and the Quantum: From the Pythagorean Mystics to Maxwell 's Demon and Quantum Mystery. Wiley-VCH, 2007
- M. Suhail Zubairy with: Quantum Optics. Cambridge University Press 1997, ISBN 0521435951
- With Willis Lamb and Murray Sargent: Laser Physics. Addison-Wesley, 1974
- With Willis Lamb, Wolfgang Schleich, Charles Townes: laser physics, quantum controversy in action, Reviews of Modern Physics, Bd.71, 1999, pp. 263-273 ( in the Millennium Edition of Rev.Mod.Phys. )
- From lasers and Masers to phaseonium and phasers, Physics Reports, Volume 219, 1992, pp. 191-201 ( anthology of the 20th Solvay Conference on Quantum Optics )