The 2006 Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics

Announced September 21, 2005. Awarded January 5, 2006, at the 36th Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics.

Manfred Kleber, Technische Universität München

For contributions to our understanding of tunneling time and quantum interference in the presence of external fields.

Manfred Kleber was born in 1942 and received his Ph.D. in physics from the Technische Hochschule München, Germany in 1969. He was educated as a theoretical nuclear physicist, working in the field of nuclear many-body theory. During his Postdoc time in Berkeley (1972/73) he became interested in atomic-physics problems with heavy-ion accelerators. He helped interpret experiments in Berkeley on radiative electron capture by highly charged ions.

In 1977, Manfred Kleber became a professor of theoretical physics in Cologne, Germany before he moved to the Technische Universität München in 1980 where he has been working up to the present, interrupted by sabbatical leaves at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, the Weizmann Institute, and at Texas A&M University, College Station.

Manfred Kleber’s research interests have been in various fields: He worked on the Higher Random Phase Approximation in atomic nuclei, on the problem of bosonization of interacting Fermi-systems, on radiation and excitation of atoms and ions during heavy-ion collisions, on the nuclear Josephson effect, on electron-positron creation in strong electric fields, on the dynamics of tunneling with special regard to the tunneling-time problem, on analytic solutions to time-dependent problems, on the time-dependent variational method in quantum mechanics, on laser-induced tunneling, on above-threshold ionization, and on the generation of high harmonics in strong laser fields.

More recently, Manfred Kleber concentrated on tunneling in three dimensions (3d) with application to scanning tunneling images, on photo-detachment in external fields, on the 3d-dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates in a gravitational field, and on the role of the electric Hall field in the Quantum-Hall effect.

Bio provided by Prof. Kleber, 2006.