Raymond Chiao

Raymond Y. Chiao ( born October 9, 1940 in Hong Kong) is an American experimental physicist who mainly deals with quantum optics.

Life

Chiao moved as a child in 1947 in the U.S., grew up in New York City and studied electrical engineering from 1957 first and then physics at Princeton University ( BA 1961), among others, John Archibald Wheeler. Originally he worked at Wheeler in theoretical physics, but then moved to MIT for experimental quantum optics and received his PhD in 1965 in the laser pioneer Charles H. Townes ( via one of the first observations of stimulated Brillouin scattering). In 1967 he was Assistant Professor at MIT. In the same year he went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor until 2006. In 2006 he went to the University of California, Merced, founded the year before, to devote himself to gravitational wave research.

In 1993 he mass ( according to previous experiments by Günter Nimtz in the microwave range ) with his doctoral Aephraim Steinberg, the tunneling rate ( about 1.7 times the speed of light) for single photons. He also was the first in optics experiments following the Berry phase.

In 2006 he was awarded the Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics and 1993 Einstein Prize for Laser Science.

Writings

• With John Garrison: Quantum Optics. Oxford University Press 2008
• (Ed.): Amazing Light - a volume dedicated to Charles H. Townes on his 80th Birthday. Springer 1996