This is the first time that the prize will be awarded to an Israeli researcher
The American Physical Society will award Research Professor Mordechai (Motti) Segev from the Faculty of Physics at the Technion the Arthur Shevlov Prize in Laser Science for 2014. This is the first time that the prize has been awarded to an Israeli researcher.
The prestigious Arthur L Schawlow Prize was established in 1991 to honor outstanding contributions to basic research in which lasers are used to advance the understanding of the fundamental physical properties of materials and their interaction with light.
The list of 25 winners of this award includes six researchers who, after winning the Shevlov Prize, won the Nobel Prize in Physics: John Hall, Steve Chu, Theodore Hench, William Phillips, Carl Wyman and David Weinland.
The award for 2014 will be awarded to Professor Segev "for an outstanding contribution to research on light-matter interactions, and especially for groundbreaking discoveries in the field of optical spatial solitons, for a historical contribution to nonlinear waves in periodic photonic systems, and for the experimental demonstration of Anderson localization."
Professor Segev, one of the ten distinguished professors (Distinguished Professors) at the Technion, has won many awards, including the prestigious award in quantum electronics in 2007 (the most important European award in the entire field of optics and lasers) and the Max Born award given by the Optical Society of America (OSA) in 2009. In 2011 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Following the win, Professor Segev said: "Discovering a new, unexpected or counter-intuitive phenomenon - these are the things that motivate me. Of course I was happy that I won the award, but in general I don't act around awards. When I was informed of my win, I was happy for about an hour and then I went back to thinking about how to draft a reply letter to the editor of one of the scientific journals who is now handling our article. Indeed, it is nice to win prizes, but there are much more important values. For example - how to return to Israel a talented young researcher who gave up an offer for the position of a faculty member with us and is becoming a professor at Harvard University these very days. In my opinion, brain drain is a national problem, and we are obliged to deal with it in a smart way and of course by educating about values. It's called Zionism without quotation marks."
