Shaul Mukamel
University of California, Irvine
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Primary Section: 14, Chemistry Secondary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2015)
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Biosketch
Shaul Mukamel is a Distinguished Professor at University of California, Irvine, received his PhD in 1976 from Tel Aviv University and has held faculty positions at Rice University, the Weizmann Institute, and the University of Rochester. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He had pioneered the development of coherent multidimensional spectroscopy techniques which span the infrared to the x-ray spectral regimes. His density matrix computational framework based on "Liouville space pathways" and his popular textbook "Principles of Nonlinear Optical Spectroscopy (1995) had created a unified approach for the design and interpretation of ultrafast spectroscopic signals in molecules. He had employed these techniques to study energy and electron transfer in photosynthetic complexes, excitons in semiconductor nanostructures and the secondary structure of proteins. Recent applications include attosecond stimulated Raman x-ray spectroscopy, and utilizing the quantum nature of optical fields and photon entanglement to obtain novel spectroscopic information that is not accessible with classical light.
Research Interests
Professor Mukamel's laboratory is interested in the design of novel ultrafast multidimensional coherent optical spectroscopies for probing and controlling electronic and vibrational dynamics in molecules. They have examined many-body theory of excitons in molecules and semiconductors. The understanding of long-range electron and energy transfer in photosynthetic light harvesting complexes is studied along with attosecond nonlinear x-ray spectroscopy of molecules and photon counting statistics in single molecule spectroscopy and nonlinear fluctuation/dissipation relations and fluctuation theorems in open quantum systems.
