Robert Hellwarth

Robert Willis Hellwarth (December 10, 1930 – January 20, 2021) was an American physicist and electrical engineer who studied quantum electronics, nonlinear optics, and photonics. He is known for the invention of Q-switching, a technique that produces short, intense pulses of laser light, and for work on optical phase conjugation and nonlinear optical processes.

Early life and education Hellwarth was born December 10, 1930, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the son of Arlen Roosevelt Hellwarth, an electrical engineer, and Sarah Townsend Hellwarth. He grew up in Detroit and attended public schools, including Cooley High School; he was offered a scholarship to Princeton University. He next attended St John’s College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he joined the Clarendon Laboratory and earned a Ph.D. in physics in 1955. His doctoral dissertation was titled An Investigation of Hyperfine Structure Using the Atomic Beam Magnetic Resonance Method. He later coauthored a 1962 paper on electron transport in polar crystals that helped develop the concept of a polaron.

He moved to the University of Southern California in 1971 as professor of electrical engineering and physics, where he became the George Pfleger Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of physics and astronomy until his retirement in 2018.

The description of his work that led to his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences mentions contributions to early laser developments at Hughes Research Laboratories and to photonics and astronomical instrumentation.

Honors and awards Source: Fellow of the American Physical Society (1982) Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1983) Fellow of the Optical Society of America (1987) and received their Charles Hard Townes Award in 1983 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) Received the IEEE Quantum Electronics Award in 1985