Terahertz pioneers: A series of interviews with significant contributors to terahertz science and technology

Abstract

In keeping with the intent of these articles to span disciplinary, continental, and application area boundaries, this month's Pioneer article focuses on Philippe Goy who not only spent a career contributing to basic physics, but who also furnished the THz community with its first widely distributed, general purpose, solid-state test and measurement instrument - the AB MILLIMETRE (ABmm) Millimeter Vector Network Analyzer (MVNA). A mathematician, an electronics tinkerer, a talented photographer, a fiction writer, a business man, an historian, all emerge from the discussion, as one tries to understand the whole from the sum of its parts. Although the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Philippe Goy's long time colleague and friend at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Serge Haroche, it was the high quality factor superconducting cavities and the precursor of the ABmm MVNA that allowed Haroche to capture and measure the characteristics of the loosely bound electrons that made up his Rydberg atoms. This millimeter-wave instrumentation was developed and painstakingly employed for several decades in the quantum physics division at Ecole Normale Sup??rieure, the laboratory in which Philippe Goy worked and called home since he began his long and distinguished career in solid-state physics at the age of 24.

Additional details