2025 Max Born Award Winner
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Technical Groups
- Bio-Medical Optics
- Fabrication, Design and Instrumentation
- Information Acquisition, Processing, Display and Perception
- Optical Interaction Science
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- Quantum
- Sensing
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Optica Names A. Douglas Stone the 2025 Max Born Award Recipient
Optica is pleased to announce that A. Douglas Stone, Yale University, USA, has been selected as the 2025 recipient of the Max Born Award. Stone is honored for pioneering concepts of coherent perfect absorption and reflectionless scattering modes, comprising a general theory of reflectionless scattering in optics, and for seminal contributions to laser theory of complex microcavities.
Stone is the Carl A. Morse Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics at Yale University. At Yale, he has served as Chair of Applied Physics, Director of Yale’s Division of Physical Sciences, and currently is Deputy Director of the Yale Quantum Institute.
He is a pioneer in the field of mesoscopic condensed matter physics, co-discovering, with Patrick Lee, the phenomenon of Universal Conductance Fluctuations. He has worked on the effects of chaos in quantum and electromagnetic systems and was the first to propose and study lasers with ray-chaotic resonators. His current work is on lasers, nonlinear optics and non-hermitian physics in systems with complex geometries. His group developed Steady-state Ab initio Laser Theory (SALT) and, in 2010, he pioneered the concept of a Coherent Perfect Absorber (a time-reversed or “anti-laser”). Recently, his group generalized this framework to encompass a general theory of reflectionless scattering of electromagnetic and matter waves.
He is a Fellow of Optica and the American Physical Society, an Honorary Member of the Aspen Center for Physics, and Chair-Elect of the APS Forum on History and Philosophy of Science.
Established in 1982, the Born Award recognizes outstanding contributions to physical optics, theoretical or experimental. It honors Max Born, who made distinguished contributions to physics in general and optics in particular. The award is endowed by the United Technologies Research Center, Physical Optics Corporation, and individuals including Joseph Goodman.
About Optica
Optica, Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide, is the society dedicated to promoting the generation, application, archiving and dissemination of knowledge in the field. Founded in 1916, it is the leading organization for scientists, engineers, business professionals, students and others interested in the science of light. Optica's renowned publications, meetings, online resources and in-person activities fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications and accelerate scientific, technical and educational achievement.
