Howard Carmichael

Howard Carmichael is a New Zealand theoretical physicist specialising in quantum optics.

Education

Carmichael gained a BSc in physics and mathematics in 1971, and a first class honours MSc in physics in 1973 at the University of Auckland. He then went to the University of Waikato, obtaining his PhD in 1977, supervised by Dan Walls. After post-doctoral positions at the City University of New York, an at the University of Texas at Austin (1979--1981) he was appointed as an assistant professor and later associate professor at the University of Arkansas. In 1991 he was appointed full professor at the University of Oregon. He returned to New Zealand in 2001 to join the University of Auckland, becoming the inaugural Dan Walls Professor of Physics.

Areas of research

• While Carmichael was still a graduate student he and his doctoral supervisor Dan Walls published a seminal paper ^[1] that showed how to create antibunched light, in which photons arrive at regular intervals, rather than randomly.
• In the early 1990s he developed the quantum jump method (at essentially the same time as the separate formulations by Dalibard Castin & Mølmer, and by Zoller, Ritsch & Dum) as a technique for simulating and understanding quantum optical systems.

• In 1993 he developed (at the same time as a separate formulation by Crispin Gardiner) the theory and application of cascaded quantum systems, in which the optical output of one quantum system becomes the optical input for another quantum system.^[2][3]

Books

• Howard Carmichael : An Open Systems Approach to Quantum Optics 1; Springer, Berlin Heidelberg 1999, 2002 ( ISBN 3-540-56634-1 )
• H J Carmichael : Statistical Methods in Quantum Optics 1; Springer, Berlin Heidelberg 1999, 2002 ( ISBN 978-3-642-08133-0 )
• H J Carmichael : Statistical Methods in Quantum Optics 2; Springer, Berlin Heidelberg 2008 ( ISBN 978-3-540-71319-7 )
• H J Carmichael, R J Glauber and M O Scully (Eds): Directions in Quantum Optics; Springer, Berlin Heidelberg 2001 ( ISBN 3-540-41187-9)

Honours and awards

The Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America (2003)^[4]

References