Prof. Dr. Mordechai SEGEV​

Mordechai Segev, Professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Haifa, Israel), is visiting the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy as a Carl Zeiss Visiting Professor in October 2010. During his stay he will give a series two lectures on modern problems in optics.

Mordechai (Moti) Segev is a Distinguished University Professor, and the Trudy and Norman Louis Professor of Physics, at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He received his B.Sc. and D.Sc. from the Technion, Israel, in 1985 and 1990, respectively. Moti Segev 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. 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), and 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), the Taub Prize (2003), and the Hershel Rich Innovation Award (2007) of the Technion. He was, furthermore, awarded the Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physics Society (highest European award in optics / lasers / quantum electronics) in 2007, the Landau Prize (Israel), as well as the prestigious "IDEAS" ("Leaders in Science" Advanced Grant from the European Research Commission (ERC) in 2008, and the Max Born Award of the OSA (a most prestigious award of the OSA) in 2009. 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 "fundamentals part" 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 12 university professors in the United States (MIT, Princeton, University of Michigan, University of Florida, and California State University at San Francisco), Germany (University of Hamburg), Taiwan (National Taiwan University at Taipei), Croatia (University of Zagreb), Italy (University of L'Aquila), and Israel (Technion x3).

Lecture 1: Sparsity-Based Sub-Wavelength Imaging, and Super-Resolution in Time and Frequency

Date: October 5, 2010, 14:00
Place: Fraunhofer IOF, Albert-Einstein-Str. 7, 07743 Jena

A fundamental restriction of optical imaging is set by the diffraction limit, stating that the maximal recoverable resolution cannot exceed one half of the optical wavelength. This seminar will describe our recent work, where we demonstrated the recovery of sub-wavelength optical images based on prior knowledge that the object is sparse, and its analogous concept in the time-domain, recovering temporal features much shorter than the response time of a photodetector.

Lecture 2: Amorphous Photonic Lattices

Date: October 6, 2010, 10:30
Place: Lecture hall 2, Helmholtzweg 5, 07743 Jena

We present the theory and experiments of amorphous photonic lattices: disordered photonic structures exhibiting a band-gap yet completely lacking Bragg diffraction. We investigate the underlying basic concepts, among them the reason for the existence of a band-gap and for the absence of Bragg diffraction, effective mass in amorphous media, defect states, and the relation to Anderson localization.