Mordechai (Moti) Segev
Neil Armstrong Distinguished Visiting Professor (2021-2026)
Mordechai “Moti” Segev is the Robert J. Shillman Distinguished Professor of Physics and of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the Technion, Israel. He received his BSc and PhD from the Technion in 1985 and 1990, respectively. After completing his postdoctoral studies at Caltech, he joined Princeton University as an assistant professor (1994), becoming an associate professor in 1997 and a professor in 1999. Subsequently, Segev went back to Israel, and in 2009 was appointed as distinguished professor – a rank that only four other Technion professors are holding.
Segev’s interests are mainly in nonlinear optics, photonics, solitons, sub-wavelength imaging, lasers, quantum simulators and quantum electronics. He has founded several fields of research, among them the field of topological photonics, Anderson localization of light, photorefractive solitons, invented topological insulator lasers, and more. More recently, he has pioneered the new research field of photonic time-crystals.
He has won numerous international awards, among them the 2007 Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physics Society, the 2009 Max Born Award of the Optical Society of America, and the 2014 Arthur Schawlow Prize of the American Physical Society, which are the highest professional awards of the three scientific societies. In 2011, he was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2015, he was elected to the National Academy of Science (NAS) of the USA, and in 2021, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). On the national level, in 2008 he won the Landau Prize, in 2014 he won the Israel Prize (highest honor in Israel) in Physics and Chemistry, in 2019 he has won the EMET Prize and in 2024 he won the Rothschild Prize. In 2023, he won an Honorary PhD from the University of Quebec.
Above all his personal achievements, he takes pride in the success of his graduate students and postdocs, including 25 current professors in the USA, Germany, Taiwan, Croatia, Italy, India, China and Israel, and many holding senior R&D; positions in the industry.
Dr. Segev's Impact
- Segev and the photonics team in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering have collaborated on a time-varying photonics project.
- “Together, we have pioneered an experimental approach to realize the elusive photonic time crystals. This collaboration resulted in the first experimental demonstration of the optical modulation on ultra-fast scale that is comparable to the single cycle of light.”
-Sasha Boltasseva, the Ron and Dotty Garvin Tonjes Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Segev and the ECE photonics team have co-authored several papers — the most important one, according to Segev, was published in Nanophotonics in 2023, drawing 60 citations in less than a year.
- “His generous sharing of knowledge and expertise has opened up new opportunities that we are actively pursuing together. We have already co-authored a paper in Nature Communications and are planning additional publications.”
-Dimitri Peroulis, senior vice president for partnerships and online and the Reilly Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- “Building on his extensive knowledge in computational photonics, Moti introduced my group to the innovative concept of algorithmically reconstructing the phase of a matter-wave wavefunction from experimental in-situ and time-of-flight density measurements, eliminating the need for interferometry. This breakthrough has the potential to significantly impact the study of quantum gas experiments, where phase information is typically absent.”
-Chen-Lung Hung, associate professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy
- “I see Purdue as my second home.”
-Mordechai “Moti” Segev
Segev is working with faculty members from the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering as well as the College of Science.
Lectures
Seminars
Entangling near-field photons in their total angular momenta
Date: Wednesday, February 19, 2:00 – 3:00 pm
Location: BNC 2001 (Birck Nanotechnology Center)
Abstract: Fundamentally, a photon carries spin, which is an intrinsic angular momentum, and orbital angular momentum (OAM), determined by the shape of its wavefunction. In paraxial optics, the two forms of angular momentum are separable, such that entanglement can be induced between the spin and OAM of a single photon or of different photons in a multi-photon state. In nanophotonic systems, however, the spin and OAM of a photon are inseparable, so what happens to the entanglement when such photons are launched into a nanophotonic system? Is the entanglement lost? Our recent work (to appear in Nature) addresses these questions, presenting the first observation of near-field photons entangled in their total angular momentum. These ideas pave the way for on-chip quantum information processing using the total angular momentum of photons as the encoding property for quantum information.