Citizenship U.S.A. Nationality Czech American Name Emil Wolf | Alma mater Bristol University Role Physicist Fields Physicist | |
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Institutions University of EdinburghUniversity of ManchesterUniversity of Rochester Residence United States of America, United Kingdom Books Principles of Optics, Introduction to the Theory of, Selected Works of Emil Wolf Similar People Max Born, Leonard Mandel, Muhammad Suhail Zubairy | ||
Doctoral advisor Edward H. Linfoot | ||
Emil Wolf (born July 30, 1922) is a Czech born American physicist who made advancements in physical optics, including diffraction, coherence properties of optical fields, spectroscopy of partially coherent radiation, and the theory of direct scattering and inverse scattering. He is also the author of several works on optics.
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Life and career
Wolf was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He was forced to leave his native country when the Germans invaded; After brief periods in Italy and France (where he worked for the Czech government in exile), he came to the United Kingdom in 1940. He received his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics (1945), and PhD in Mathematics from Bristol University, England, in 1948. Between 1951 and 1954 he worked at the University of Edinburgh with Max Born, writing the famous textbook on Optics now usually known simply as 'Born and Wolf'. After a period on the Faculty of the University of Manchester, he moved to the United States in 1959 to take a position at the University of Rochester. He is currently (2012) the Wilson Professor of Optical Physics at the University of Rochester. He is a naturalized US citizen. He was president of the Optical Society of America in 1978. Wolf now resides in Cloverwood in Pittsford, New York, with his wife.
He also predicted a new mechanism that produces redshift and blueshift, that is not due to moving sources (Doppler effect), that has subsequently been confirmed experimentally (called the Wolf Effect). Technically, he found that two non-Lambertian sources that emit beamed energy, can interact in a way that causes a shift in the spectral lines. It is analogous to a pair of tuning forks with similar frequencies (pitches), connected together mechanically with a sounding board; there is a strong coupling that results in the resonant frequencies getting "dragged down" in pitch. The Wolf Effect can produce either redshifts or blueshifts, depending on the observer's point of view, but is redshifted when the observer is head-on. A subsequent 1999 article by Sisir Roy et al. have suggested that the Wolf Effect may explain discordant redshift in certain quasars Ref.
Works
Wolf is a very well known author in the field of optics. Along with Max Born, he co-wrote Principles of Optics of one of the standard textbooks of optics commonly known as "Born and Wolf". He also co-authored, along with Leonard Mandel, Optical Coherence and Quantum Optics. He is the author of Introduction to the Theory of Coherence and Polarization of Light and Selected Works of Emil Wolf with Commentary (World Scientific Publishing, 2001, ISBN 981-281-187-7). He also edits the Progress in Optics series of books since its inception in 1962.