Mordechai (Moti) Segev
Technion-Israel Institute of Technology
|
Primary Section: 31, Engineering Sciences Secondary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2015)
|
Biosketch
Moti Segev is the Robert J. Shillman Distinguished Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, at the Technion, Israel. He received his BSc and PhD from the Technion in 1985 and 1990. After postdoc at Caltech, he joined Princeton as Assistant Professor (1994), becoming Associate Professor in 1997, and Professor in 1999. Subsequently, Moti went back to Israel, and in 2009 was appointed as Distinguished Professor (highest Technion rank, held only by 4 other active faculty members). He has won numerous international awards, among them the 2007 Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physics Society, the 2009 Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America, and the 2014 Arthur Schawlow Prize of the American Physical Society. In 2011, he was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in 2015 he was elected to the NAS. In 2014 won the Israel Prize in Physics and Chemistry (highest honor in Israel) and in 2019 he has won the EMET Prize (Israel). However, above all his personal achievements, he takes pride in the success of his graduate students and postdocs, among them are currently 23 professors in the USA, Germany, Taiwan, Croatia, Italy, India, China and Israel, and many holding senior R&D positions in the industry.
Research Interests
I am interested in exploring physical phenomena through optics, searching for ideas that are universal to all wave systems in nature. My research interests are mainly in physical optics, quantum electronics, nonlinear optics, solitons, sub-wavelength imaging and lasers. Among my most significant contributions are (chronologically) the discoveries of photorefractive solitons, of incoherent solitons (solitons made of incoherent white light from an incandescent bulb), the first observation of 2D lattice solitons, the first experimental demonstration of Anderson localization in a disordered periodic system, the discovery of hyper-transport (transport faster than ballistic) of waves in a spatially-random potential that fluctuates in time, demonstrating the first photonic topological insulator, and the co-invention of the concept of sparsity-based subwavelength imaging and super-resolution. The current activity within my group is in several areas: (1) Topological Photonics and Photonic Topological Insulators, (2) Light and Disorder (Anderson localization of light & Hyper-transport), (3) Light in Subwavelength Structures, (4) Light in curved-space settings inspired by General Relativity, (5) Structure-based Subwavelength Imaging, and Super-resolution in Time, Frequency, and Quantum Systems, and (6) Complex Opto-Fluidics. Beyond these current topics, we are interested more generally in new ideas in the broad subjects associated with the dynamics of waves.
