UH physicist invited to give plenary lecture at the 2015 Nobel Symposium

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Contact:
Pui Lam, (808) 956-2988
Professor/Department Chair, Physics and Astronomy
Wally Zimmerman, (808) 222-7620
College of Natural Sciences
Posted: May 20, 2014

Professor John Madey
Professor John Madey

Professor John Madey of the UH Mānoa Department of Physics and Astronomy has been invited to give a plenary lecture at the Nobel Symposium on Free Electron Laser Research, which will be held in Sigtuna (near Stockholm), Sweden, from June 14 -18, 2015.  The Symposium is devoted to an "area of science where breakthroughs are occurring" and is sponsored by the Nobel Foundation and the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

Madey is best known for the invention of the free-electron laser (FEL), a very powerful light source for research in medicine and biology, electronic materials, nuclear physics and manufacturing. Prior to joining UHM in 1998, Madey was a tenured professor at Stanford University and later the director of the Free Electron Laser Laboratory at Duke University.  Throughout his career, Madey has made pioneering contributions to the physics of FELs and their applications and holds many patents on innovative technologies.  He has won numerous awards including the Stuart Ballantine Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1989 and more recently the 2012 Robert R. Wilson Prize from the American Physical Society.

The UH FEL is one of the five free-electron lasers currently operating in the United States.  FEL group faculty members at the Mānoa campus are pursuing the applications to the study of fundamental problems in classical and quantum physics and to atmospheric remote sensing. They are also pursuing the development of lower cost, compact FEL-based x-ray and gamma ray light sources for applications in the imaging and analysis of crystal structures in proteomics and genomics, and the identification of concealed nuclear materials.