The American Physical Society awards its most prestigious award in Laser Science to Professor Mordechai (Moti) Segev from the Technion

56This is the first time this award has been awarded to an Israeli researcher

The American Physical Society will award Distinguished Professor Mordechai (Moti) Segev from Technion’s Faculty of Physics, the prestigious Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science for 2014.

The highly esteemed Arthur L. Schawlow award was founded in 1991 in order to recognize outstanding basic research contributions where lasers are used to promote the understanding of the fundamental physical properties of materials and their interaction with light.

Among the list of 25 past winners of this award, there are six people who, after winning the Schawlow Prize, went onto win the Nobel Prize in Physics, among them: John Hall, Steve Chu, Theodor Hansch, William Phillips, Carl Wieman, and David Wineland.

The 2014 award will be awarded to Professor Segev for his “groundbreaking contributions to the study of light-matter interactions, in particular the discovery of optical spatial solitons in photorefractive media, for milestone contributions on nonlinear waves in photonic lattices, and for observation of Anderson localization of light.”

Professor Segev is one of the ten Distinguished Professors of the Technion. He has received many academic awards over the years, including the prestigious Quantum Electronics Prize in 2007 (the most important award given by the European Physics Society for all areas of optics and lasers), and the Max Born Award conferred by the Optical Society of America in 2009. In 2011, he was elected into the National Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Following the announcement, Professor Segev said the following, “Discovering new phenomena, unexpected or counterintuitive, are the things that motivate me. Of course I was glad to hear that I have won this award, but in general, I carry out my work without thinking about awards. When they told me about this award, I was excited for about an hour, and then went back to thinking about how respond to the editor of one of the scientific journals currently handling our research article. Indeed, it’s nice to win awards but there are more important values in life. For example – how to bring back to Israel a young talented researcher who preferred to take a professorship position at Harvard University instead of accepting an offer from the Technion. This ‘brain drain’ from Israel is a national problem. We must handle it wisely in a way which should, among other things, include education for values. It’s called Zionism without quotation marks.

Professor Segev is the Scientific Director of the I-CORE in Light and Matter Center of Excellence.

Above: Professor Mordechai (Moti) Segev. Photographed by: Technion Spokesperson’s Office