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

The Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics is presented annually for outstanding contributions to the field. The award honors Willis E. Lamb, Jr., famous laser scientist and 1955 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, who gave us many seminal insights and served as our guide in so many areas of physics and technology.

The 2009 winners are: Robert W. Boyd of The University of Rochester, Robert L. Byer of Stanford University, and Norbert Kroó of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The award will be presented at PQE-2009.

The award is sponsored by the Physics of Quantum Electronics (PQE) conference and presented at its Winter Colloquium in Snowbird, Utah. This conference, now in its 39th year, attracts researchers in laser physics and quantum electronics from around the globe.

Previous winners of the award are:

  2008:   Gershon Kurizki, Mark Raizen, and Wolfgang Schleich.
  2007:   Hans Frauenfelder, Moshe Shapiro, and Sunney Xie.
  2006:   Raymond Chiao, Roy Glauber, and Manfred Kleber.
  2005:   Gérard Mourou, Szymon Suckewer, and Sune Svanberg.
  2004:   Karl Kompa, Stuart Rice, and Lu Sham.
  2003:   Leon Cohen, Michael Feld, and Herschel Rabitz.
  2002:   Jonathan Dowling, Luigi Lugiato, and Yanhua Shih.
  2001:   James Gordon and Herman Haus.
  2000:   Federico Capasso and Alfred Y. Cho
  1999:   Melvin Lax, Lorenzo Narducci, and Herbert Walther.
  1998:   Ali Javan, Olga Kocharovskaya, and Paul Mandel.
    (Inaugural Year)