Masud Mansuripur: Developing a theory of optical momentum
Applications of radiation pressure and photon momentum include solar sails, optical tweezers for optical trapping and micromanipulation, and optically driven micromotors and actuators.
Masud Mansuripur is professor and chair of Optical Data Storage at the College of Optical Sciences of the University of Arizona in Tucson. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1981.
Mansuripur is the author of "Introduction to Information Theory" (Prentice-Hall, 1987), "The Physical Principles of Magneto-Optical Recording" (Cambridge University Press, 1995), "Classical Optics and its Applications" (Cambridge University Press, 2002, second edition 2009, Japanese translation 2006 and 2012), and "Field, Force, Energy and Momentum in Classical Electrodynamics" (Bentham e-books, 2011).
A Fellow of OSA and SPIE, he is the author or co-author of nearly 250 technical papers in the areas of optical data recording, magneto-optics, optical materials fabrication and characterization, thin film optics, diffraction theory, macromolecular data storage, and problems associated with radiation pressure and photon momentum.
