MURRAY HILL, N.J. - Physicist Melvin Lax has been awarded the Willis E. Lamb Medal for Laser Physics, in recognition of pioneering research he conducted at Bell Labs in the 1960s. Also receiving the award earlier this month, at the 29^th Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics in Snowbird, Utah, were Lorenzo Narducci and Herbert Walther.

A distinguished professor of physics at the City College of New York since 1971, Lax has been affiliated with Bell Labs for 44 years. He worked at Bell Labs from 1955 to 1972 and remains a consultant. Lorenzo Narducci is Davis Professor of Physics at Drexel University in Philadelphia; Herbert Walther is Director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich, Germany.

Less than five years after the invention of the laser, Lax began publishing a series of theoretical papers that proved fundamental to the scientific understanding of this new class of device. Narducci and Walther have applied Lax's theoretical work in recent years.

"Mel Lax is one of the fathers of quantum optics," said Dick Slusher, head of Optical Physics Research, the Bell Labs department with which Lax is currently associated. "When I was starting out in this field, his work was required reading, as part of a very small set of seminal papers describing how lasers worked."

Lax is the author of more than 200 publications, including several books and a paper that has achieved the status of a "citation classic." He holds two patents, one in laser design and one in the area of optical inversion. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the Optical Society of America; he has served on numerous editorial and advisory boards. Lax has taught at Syracuse University, Princeton University, and Oxford University.

Lax's early work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his Ph.D., was in the fields of acoustics, nuclear physics, and meson physics. He continued this work at Syracuse University, where he also did seminal work on the multiple scattering of waves and moved on to semiconductor physics research. His next move was to Bell Labs.

"Mel Lax is one of the scientists who made Bell Labs theoretical solid-state physics the best in the world," according to Physical Sciences Research Vice President Bill Brinkman.

Lax's current research includes inverting optical scattering data from a turbid medium to detect impurities, such as tumors in the human breast.

Bell Labs is the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) (LU), headquartered at Murray Hill, N.J. Lucent designs, builds, and delivers a wide range of public and private networks, communications systems and software, data networking systems, business telephone systems, and microelectronics components. For more information on Lucent, visit the company's Web site at http://www.lucent.com. For more on past and present laser R&D at Bell Labs, see the Web site celebrating the laser's 40th anniversary: http://www.bell-labs.com/laser.

TECHNICAL BACKGROUND

In the earliest days of lasers, scientists lacked mathematical techniques to make some of the most basic problems tractable. What is the physical nature of a laser? Why does a laser emit such a narrow line of coherent light? What simple models can be used to explain the complex phenomena of noise in a quantum mechanical device, such as the effects of noise on a laser's linewidth? Classical physics and electrical engineering research conveyed a wealth of analogous knowledge but could not directly explain the inner workings of a laser. One of Lax's key contributions was deriving a way to translate quantum physical problems into apparently classical terms.

Lax guessed, then proved, that a noisy, rotating wave Van der Pol oscillator would serve as a good approximation of quantum noise in a laser. Proving this correspondence principle made it possible to shift ground from an area where physicists had no techniques for solving such problems to an area where they did. In papers such as "Formal Theory of Quantum Fluctuations from a Driven State" - presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in 1960 and published in Physical Review in 1963 - Lax extended a classical equilibrium technique known as Onsager's statistical regression analysis into the quantum nonequilibrium realm. Predictions made using the Lax-Onsager quantum regression theorem matched detailed observations of lasers' behavior perfectly. The complete model used to obtain this agreement involved the construction, for the first time, of quantum noise sources. The full significance of this work lies in the threefold combination of the regression theorem, the modeling of quantum noise sources, and an exact solution describing the rotating wave Van der Pol oscillator with these sources.

Lax's study of noise in semiconductor devices - which are in nonequilibrium whenever current is drawn - led to a prescription for dealing with all classical systems. Four thousand reprints of the paper describing this work virtually flew out the door. Lax then extended his research to self-sustained oscillators and to quantum systems; this is the work for which the Lamb Medal was given.

Patrick Regan
Bell Labs Media Relations
908-582-3400
Email:mediarelations@lucent.com

Donna Cunningham
Bell Labs Media Relations
908-582-3400
Email:mediarelations@lucent.com