ORC Seminar Series

Speaker: Professor Mordechai Segev, Tecnion, Israel

Date: 2 September 2009

Time: 2pm

Venue: Mountbatten Seminar Room

Abstract

Anderson localization is one of the basic concepts in solid state physics, yet its experimental observation has eluded scientists for many years. Two years ago, Anderson localization has been demonstrated in photonic lattices, which are excellent model systems for studying wave localization due to disorder. The recent progress on Anderson Localization of light will be reviewed, including the additional effects of nonlinearity, with an emphasis on generic features common to other wave systems in nature.

Biography   

Mordechai (Moti) Segev is the Trudy and Norman Louis Professor of Physics, at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He has received his B.Sc. and D.Sc. from the Technion, Israel, in 1985 and 1990, respectively. Moti Segev has spent one year at Caltech as a post-doctoral fellow and two more years as a Senior Research Fellow. He joined Princeton in September of 1994 as an Assistant Professor, becoming an Associate Professor in 1997, and a Professor in 1999. In the summer of 1998, Moti Segev went back to his home country, Israel, and joined the Technion, eventually resigning from Princeton in 2000.

Moti Segev's research interests are mainly in Nonlinear Optics, Solitons, Lasers and Quantum Electronics, although he finds much entertainment in more demanding fields such as basketball and hiking. He has more than 240 publications in refereed journals, 11 book chapters, and has given ~ 90 invited, keynote, and plenary presentations at conferences. His over all H-Factor is 54, and he has more than 11,500 citations, per ISI Web of Knowledge.

Among his most significant contributions are the discoveries of photorefractive solitons, of random-phase solitons (also called incoherent solitons, or self-trapping of solitons made of incoherent white light from an incandescent bulb), the first observation of 2D lattice solitons, and the first experimental demonstration of Anderson localization in a disordered periodic system.

Moti Segev is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America OSA (1997), a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2000). He has won several awards, among them the Sloan Research Award in Physics (USA, 1995), the Braun-Roger-Siegl Research Award of the Israeli Science Foundation (2002), and the Taub Prize (2003) and the Hershel Rich Innovation Award (2007) of the Technion. In 2007, he won the Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physics Society (highest European award in optics / lasers / quantum electronics). In 2009 he won the Max Born Award of the OSA (a most prestigious award of the OSA). In 2008 he won the Landau Prize (Israel).

Also, in 2008, he has won the prestigious ³IDEAS² (³Leaders in Science² Advanced Grant from the European Research Commission (ERC). He has served as the General Chair and Program Chair of several international conferences, and two terms as the Topical Editor on Nonlinear Optics in the premiere optics magazine Optics Letters. In 2009 he served as the General Chair of IQEC (the ³fundamentals part² of CLEO), and as the Chair of the awards committee of the Quantum Electronics Prize (same award he won in 2007). Also in 2009, he was appointed as Distinguished University Professor - the highest rank at the Technion, currently held by only four other professors.

However, above all his personal achievements Moti Segev takes pride in the success of the graduate students and post-doctoral fellows that have worked with him over the years. Among those are currently 10 university professors in the United States (MIT, Princeton, University of Michigan, University of Florida, and California State University at San Francisco), Germany (University of Clausthal), Taiwan (National Taiwan University at Taipei), Croatia (University of Zagreb), Italy (University of L¹Aquila), and Israel (Technion).