Eric Mazur
| Eric Mazur | |
|---|---|
Eric Mazur
|
|
| Born |
November 14, 1954 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | Dutch |
| Fields | Physics, Applied physics |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Alma mater |
Leiden University (doctoral) Harvard University (postdoctoral) |
| Doctoral advisor |
Jan Beenakker (doctoral) Nicolaas Bloembergen (postdoc) |
| Known for |
Ultrafast Phenomena Peer Instruction |
| Notable awards | Presidential Young Investigator Award (1988) Esther Hoffman Beller Award (2009) Millikan Medal (2009) Minerva Prize (2014) |
Eric Mazur (born November 14, 1954) is a physicist and educator at Harvard University, and an entrepreneur in technology start-ups for the educational and technology markets. Mazur's research is in experimental ultrafast optics and condensed matter physics. Born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Leiden University.
Mazur studied physics and astronomy at Leiden University. He passed his "doctoraal examen" (equivalent to a master's degree) in 1977 and continued his graduate studies at the same institution. In 1981 he obtained his Ph.D on a thesis entitled "The structure of non-equilibrium angular momentum polarizations in polyatomic gases". Although he intended to go on to a career in industry with Philips N.V. in Eindhoven, he left Europe at the urging of his father, Peter Mazur, to pursue a postdoctoral study with recent Nobel laureate Nicolaas Bloembergen at Harvard University.
After two years as a postdoc, Mazur was offered a position of assistant professor at Harvard University. In 1987 he was promoted to associate professor and obtained tenure three years later in 1990. Mazur currently holds a chair as Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics jointly in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and in the Physics Department. He is also the Dean of Applied Physics.
Mazur's early work at Harvard focused on the use of short-pulse lasers to carry out spectroscopy of highly vibrationally excited molecules. Mazur and his group have made many pioneering contributions to the field of ultrashort laser pulses and their interactions with matter ("femtosecond material science"). In 1989 his group was one of the first in academia to build a colliding-pulse mode-locked laser, which generated pulses of only 70 femtosecond duration. After early measurements by Mazur’s group demonstrated conclusively that solids can undergo a structural phase transition without appreciable heating of the lattice, Mazur’s group developed a technique to measure the full dielectric function of highly excited semiconductors. Since then the group’s use of this technique and various nonlinear optical probes to study laser-induced structural phase transitions.
...
Wikipedia