Mordechai (Moti) Segev

The Robert J. Shillman Distinguished Professor Faculty of Physics and Faculty of Electrical Engineering Solid State Institute Technion

Academic Achievements

Among the most significant contributions are:

  1. The discovery of self-trapping of spatially-incoherent light and of white Light (first observation + first theories that explained it and made further predictions).
  2. The discovery of photorefractive spatial solitons (theoretical prediction + first experimental demonstration).
  3. First experimental observation of Anderson Localization in a perturbed periodic structure.
  4. Invention of the sparsity-based concept for sub-wavelength imaging and phase-retrieval, and related structure-based methods for algorithmic super-resolution.
  5. The discovery of modulation instability and spontaneous pattern formation in a weakly-correlated (or incoherent) nonlinear wave system (theoretical prediction + first experimental demonstration).
  6. First experimental observation of two-dimensional solitons in 2D periodic lattices (first 2D ³discrete/ lattice solitons²).
  7. Discovery of accelerating wave-packets of Maxwell’s equations.
  8. First experimental observation of spatial gap solitons.
  9. First experimental observation of 3D soliton interaction-collisions, soliton spiraling, etc.
  10. First experimental observation of multi-mode and of multi-hump solitons.
  11. First experimental demonstration of nonlinear photonic quasi-crystals, and wave dynamics therein.
  12. The theoretical and experimental discovery of incoherent  dark solitons
  13. Theoretical prediction of soliton fractals.
  14. Prediction and first observation of random-phase lattice solitons.
  15. Demonstration of the world’s first quantum-dot photo-detector.
  16. Discovery of nonlinear accelerating wave-packets.
  17. Theory and experimental demonstration of the relation between nonlinear self-oscillation and order-disorder phase transition
  18. First experiments on nonlinear wave dynamics in photorefractive waveguides
  19. First demonstration of controlling laser diode arrays with phase-conjugate mirrors, and using it for mode-locking the laser arrays.
  20. Prediction + first observation of surface waves in nonlocal nonlinear media.
  21. First experiments on soliton tunneling.
  22. Prediction + first experiments on symmetry-drive conical diffraction (conical diffraction in honeycomb lattices).