James P. Gordon
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James Power Gordon (March 20, 1928 – June 21, 2013) was an American physicist known for his work in the fields of
optics Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviole ...
and
quantum electronics Quantum optics is a branch of atomic, molecular, and optical physics dealing with how individual quanta of light, known as photons, interact with atoms and molecules. It includes the study of the particle-like properties of photons. Photons have b ...
. His contributions include the design, analysis and construction of the first
maser A maser (, an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. The first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, Ja ...
in 1954 as a doctoral student at
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
under the supervision of C. H. Townes, development of the quantal equivalent of Shannon's information capacity formula in 1962, development of the theory for the diffusion of atoms in an optical trap (together with A. Ashkin) in 1980, and the discovery of what is now known as the Gordon-Haus effect in
soliton In mathematics and physics, a soliton or solitary wave is a self-reinforcing wave packet that maintains its shape while it propagates at a constant velocity. Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium ...
transmission, together with H. A. Haus in 1986. Gordon was a member of the National Academy of Engineering (since 1985) and the
National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
(since 1988).


Biography and personal life

J. P. Gordon was born in
Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
,
New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...
, on March 20, 1928, and was raised in
Forest Hills, Queens Forest Hills is a mostly residential neighborhood in the central portion of the borough of Queens in New York City. It is adjacent to Corona to the north, Rego Park and Glendale to the west, Forest Park to the south, Kew Gardens to the southeast, ...
and Scarsdale, New York. His father, Robert S. Gordon was a lawyer and worked as VP and General Counsel for National Dairy, now Kraftco. Gordon attended Scarsdale High School and
Phillips Exeter Academy (not for oneself) la, Finis Origine Pendet (The End Depends Upon the Beginning) gr, Χάριτι Θεοῦ (By the Grace of God) , location = 20 Main Street , city = Exeter, New Hampshire , zipcode ...
(Class of 1945). In 1949, he received a bachelor's degree from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
(MIT) and joined the physics department of
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
as a graduate student. He received his Masters and PhD degrees in physics in 1951 and 1955, respectively. In the framework of his doctoral research he designed, built and demonstrated the successful operation of the first maser together with
Herbert J. Zeiger Herbert J. Zeiger (b. 16 March 1925 in the Bronx, New York City, United States; d. 14 January 2011) was an American physicist and co-developer of the first maser. Zeiger graduated from the City College of New York with a bachelor's degree in 1944 ...
and with his doctoral advisor
Charles H. Townes Charles Hard Townes (July 28, 1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American physicist. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated wi ...
. The invention of the maser won the Nobel Prize in Physics, which C.H. Townes shared in 1964 with the Russian scientists N. Bassov and A. Prokhorov. Starting in 1955 and until his retirement in 1996, Gordon worked as a scientist at AT&T Bell-Laboratories, where in the period between 1958 and 1980 he headed the Quantum Electronics Research Department, located initially in Murray Hill and later in Holmdel Township, both in the state of New Jersey. In 1962–1963, he spent one year as a visiting professor at the
University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...
. In 1960, he married Susanna Bland Waldner, a former Bell-Labs computer programmer. The couple had three children: James Jr., Susanna, and Sara. A resident of Rumson, New Jersey, he died aged 85 on June 21, 2013, at a hospital in New York City due to cancer.Martin, Douglas
"James Gordon Dies at 85; Work Paved Way for Laser"
''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', July 27, 2013. Accessed July 29, 2013.
In addition to his scientific career, Gordon played
platform tennis Platform may refer to: Technology * Computing platform, a framework on which applications may be run * Platform game, a genre of video games * Car platform, a set of components shared by several vehicle models * Weapons platform, a system or ...
, having won the U.S. National Championship for men's doubles in 1959, and mixed doubles in 1961 and 1962. Gordon's brother, Robert S. Gordon Jr. (1926–1984) set up a Cholera Clinic in East Pakistan, where he made seminal contributions to the study of this disease. The Gordon Lecture in Epidemiology is a yearly award in his honor, granted by the
National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...
(NIH).


Scientific activity


Lasers and resonators

During his doctoral training period with C.H. Townes at Columbia University, Gordon worked on the design, analysis and construction of the maser. This work produced the first prototype of what later evolved into the
laser A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word "laser" is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". The fir ...
(originally called "optical maser") and became one of the most important workhorses in 20th-century technology. Gordon's later contribution to lasers included the analysis of the confocal, or curved mirror laser resonator. He joined with G. Boyd, to introduce the concept of Hermite-Gaussian modes into resonator study, influencing all subsequent research conducted on laser resonators. In his work with R.L. Fork and O.E. Martinez in 1994, a mechanism for generating tunable negative dispersion using pairs of prisms was proposed. This invention was instrumental in achieving ultra-short laser pulses, critical in many applications using laser technology.


Quantum information

In 1962, Gordon studied the implications of quantum mechanics on Shannon's information capacity. He pointed out the main effects of quantization and conjectured the quantum equivalent of Shannon's formula for the information capacity of a channel. Gordon's conjecture, later proven by
Alexander Holevo Alexander Semenovich Holevo(russian: Алекса́ндр Семéнович Хóлево, also spelled as Kholevo and Cholewo) is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, one of the pioneers of quantum information science. Biography Steklov Mathem ...
and known as
Holevo's theorem Holevo's theorem is an important limitative theorem in quantum computing, an interdisciplinary field of physics and computer science. It is sometimes called Holevo's bound, since it establishes an upper bound to the amount of information that can ...
, became one of the central results in the modern field of
quantum information Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both th ...
theory. In his work with W.H. Louisell published in 1966, Gordon addressed the problem of measurement in quantum physics, focusing in particular on the simultaneous measurement of noncommuting observables. The concept of "measurement operator," which was introduced in that work was an early version of what is currently referred to as positive-operator valued measure (POVM) in the context of quantum measurement theory. After his retirement, Gordon re-engaged with the topic of quantum information and his last paper on the subject, titled "Communication and Measurement", was published on arxiv one year after his death.


Atom diffusion

Having joined
Arthur Ashkin Arthur Ashkin (September 2, 1922 – September 21, 2020) was an American scientist and Nobel laureate who worked at Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies. Ashkin has been considered by many as the father of optical tweezers, "LaserFest – th ...
's efforts of manipulating microparticles with laser beams, Gordon wrote the first theory describing radiation forces and momenta in dielectric media. Later, jointly with Ashkin, he modeled the motion of atoms in a radiation trap. This work together with Ashkin's experiments, was the basis for what later developed into the fields of
atom trapping A magnetic trap is an apparatus which uses a magnetic field gradient to trap neutral particles with magnetic moments. Although such traps have been employed for many purposes in physics research, they are best known as the last stage in cooling atom ...
and
optical tweezers Optical tweezers (originally called single-beam gradient force trap) are scientific instruments that use a highly focused laser beam to hold and move microscopic and sub-microscopic objects like atoms, nanoparticles and droplets, in a manner simila ...
.


Solitons and optical communications

Much of Gordon's later career focused on the study of soliton transmission in optical fibers. He reported the first experimental observation of solitons in optical fibers in a paper co-authored with R.H. Stolen and L.F. Mollenauer. In a seminal 1986 paper, Gordon explained and formulated the theory of the soliton self-frequency shift that had been observed prior to that in experiments. In the same year, together with Prof. H. A. Haus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he predicted and quantified the timing-jitter effect resulting from the coupling between solitons and optical amplification noise in amplified optical systems. This effect was shown to be one of the most fundamental factors in determining the performance of soliton systems and it is now broadly recognized as the Gordon-Haus effect. In 1990, Gordon and Mollenauer predicted and analyzed the enhancement of phase-noise as a result of the optical nonlinearity of fibers. This phenomenon, often referred to as the Gordon-Mollenauer effect, was a key factor in preventing the use of solitons in coherent optical communications. Gordon's most recent major contribution to the field of fiber-optic communications was in the mathematical formulation of the phenomenon of
polarization mode dispersion Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) is a form of modal dispersion where two different polarizations of light in a waveguide, which normally travel at the same speed, travel at different speeds due to random imperfections and asymmetries, causing ...
(PMD), which constitutes one of the most important factors in determining the performance of fiber-optic systems. His paper, coauthored with H. Kogelnik, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the formulation presented therein became standard in many of the subsequent texts dealing with polarization phenomena in optical fibers.


Societies and honors

* Fellow of the
American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...
* Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) * Life fellow of
IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...
*
Charles Hard Townes Award The Charles Hard Townes Award of The Optical Society is a prize for Quantum Electronics — that is to say, the physics of lasers. Awarded annually since 1981, it is named after the Nobel Prize-winning laser pioneer Charles H. Townes.
(OSA, 1981) * National Academy of Engineering (
member Member may refer to: * Military jury, referred to as "Members" in military jargon * Element (mathematics), an object that belongs to a mathematical set * In object-oriented programming, a member of a class ** Field (computer science), entries in ...
since 1985) *
National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
(
member Member may refer to: * Military jury, referred to as "Members" in military jargon * Element (mathematics), an object that belongs to a mathematical set * In object-oriented programming, a member of a class ** Field (computer science), entries in ...
since 1988) *
Max Born Award The Max Born Award is given by the Optical Society (formerly the Optical Society of America) for "outstanding contributions to physical optics", and is named after Max Born. Recipients SourceThe Optical Society * 2022 Yuri Kivshar * 2021 Anne L ...
(OSA, 1991) * Willis E. Lamb Award for laser science and quantum optics (2001) * Fredrick Ives Medal (OSA, 2002) * Honorary Member of the Optical Society (OSA, 2011)http://www.osa.org/Membership/Member_Categories/Honorary/


References


External links


The development of lasers from the website of Science Clarified.


* ttp://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/01/19/laserfest/ Interview with C.H. Townes for the laser’s 50th birthday
The Gordon-Haus effect explained, Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology

Scientists (including three Nobel prize laureates) talk at a symposium held in Gordon's memory
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gordon, James P. 1928 births 2013 deaths American physicists Deaths from cancer in New York (state) Columbia University alumni Experimental physicists Optical physicists Laser researchers Fellows of the Optical Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences People from Brooklyn People from Forest Hills, Queens People from Rumson, New Jersey People from Scarsdale, New York Phillips Exeter Academy alumni Platform tennis players Scientists from New York (state) Fellows of the American Physical Society