Peter Franken
1929-2001

A member of the Michigan Physics Faculty from 1955 until 1972, and subsequently a leader of the Institute for Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, , Peter Franken made seminal discoveries in modern optics and atomic physics. He was the leading member of the Michigan group (Franken, Hill, Peters and Weinreich) that opened the entire field of non-lnear optics by generating optical harmonics in crystals that lacked inversion symmetry. Together with Colgrove, Sands, and Lewis he pioneered the method of level-crossing spectrscopy that used optical pumping and measurements of the angular distribution outgoing radiation to deduce precise values of of atomic fine structure.

 

 

more about Peter Franken
Franken at Michigan
Franken at Arizona