Alexander Szameit

Szameit studied physics at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Jena, graduating in 2004.[1] Following that, from 2004 to 2007 he pursued a doctoral degree at the University of Jena, graduating with the highest honor of "summa cum laude".[2] From 2009 he worked at the Technion in Haifa as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Mordechai Segev.[3] In 2011 he returned to the University of Jena as a junior professor and acquired his habilitation in 2015.[4] Since 2016, he is a professor at the University of Rostock, where he leads the Experimental Solid-state Optics group.[1] Since 2022, Szameit also serves on the board of the German Research Foundation's collaborative research center 1477 "LiMatI"[5]

Szameit's work focuses on the investigation of optical wave phenomena in discrete systems.[6][7] As experimental platforms, he utilizes artificial structured media such as arrays of coupled optical waveguides directly inscribed into glass chips by ultrafast laser pulses,[7] or synthetic mesh lattices implemented by time-multiplexed loops of optical fibers.[8] Using these techniques, his research[6] covers a broad range of fields ranging from topological photonics,[9] non-Hermitian[8] and PT-symmetric[10] optical systems, integrated quantum photonics[11] and nonlinear optics[12] to synthetic dimensions[13] and the emulation of relativistic physics[14] in on-chip light-based settings.

• 2009: Doctoral prize of the DPG (German Physical Society)[15]
• 2014: Adolph Lomb Medal of the Optical Society[16]
• 2015: Rudolf Kaiser award for experimental physics[17]
• 2017: Alfried Krupp prize of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation[2]
• 2020: Tomassoni award[18]

• Rechtsman, Mikael C., Julia M. Zeuner, Yonatan Plotnik, Yaakov Lumer, Daniel Podolsky, Felix Dreisow, Stefan Nolte, Mordechai Segev, and Alexander Szameit. "Photonic Floquet topological insulators." Nature 496, no. 7444 (2013): 196–200.
• Weimann, Steffen, Manuel Kremer, Yonatan Plotnik, Yaakov Lumer, Stefan Nolte, Konstantinos G. Makris, Mordechai Segev, Mikael C. Rechtsman, and Alexander Szameit. "Topologically protected bound states in photonic parity–time-symmetric crystals." Nature materials 16, no. 4 (2017): 433–438.
• Tillmann, Max, Borivoje Dakić, René Heilmann, Stefan Nolte, Alexander Szameit, and Philip Walther. "Experimental boson sampling." Nature photonics 7, no. 7 (2013): 540–544.
• Zeuner, Julia M., Mikael C. Rechtsman, Yonatan Plotnik, Yaakov Lumer, Stefan Nolte, Mark S. Rudner, Mordechai Segev, and Alexander Szameit. "Observation of a topological transition in the bulk of a non-Hermitian system." Physical review letters 115, no. 4 (2015): 040402.
• Szameit, Alexander, and Stefan Nolte. "Discrete optics in femtosecond-laser-written photonic structures." Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics 43, no. 16 (2010): 163001.