13 Facts About Howard Carmichael

Howard Carmichael is the Dan Walls Professor of Physics at the University of Auckland and a principal investigator of the Dodd-Walls Centre.

Howard Carmichael is a Fellow of Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Howard Carmichael was awarded the Max Born Award in 2003, the Humboldt Research Award in 1997 and the Dan Walls Medal of the New Zealand Institute of Physics in 2017.

Howard Carmichael was born in Manchester England on January 17,1950 and emigrated to New Zealand.

Howard Carmichael gained a BSc in physics and mathematics in 1971, and an MSc in physics in 1973 at the University of Auckland.

Howard Carmichael then travelled to the United States for further postgraduate studies.

Howard Carmichael was a visiting scientist at the Royal Signal and Radar Establishment in Malvern in 1984, visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 and at Caltech in 1989.

Howard Carmichael returned to New Zealand in 2002 to join the University of Auckland, becoming the inaugural Dan Walls Professor of Physics, a position he still holds today.

Howard Carmichael has made seminal contributions to the field of quantum optics and open quantum systems over more than four decades.

Howard Carmichael is known particularly for his development of quantum trajectory theory, which offers a way to describe the evolution of a quantum system as it interacts with its environment.

Howard Carmichael has contributed to advances in the theory of nonclassical light and quantum correlation, quantum optical measurements, quantum fluctuations and noise in radiative processes, nonlinear physics and multi-photon processes, cavity quantum electrodynamics, quantum statistical methods and quantum entanglement.

In 1976, while Howard Carmichael was still a graduate student, he and his doctoral supervisor Dan Walls published a seminal paper that predicted photon antibunching, which led to the experimental demonstration of the quantum nature of light.

The paper was based on their work with master equation techniques to describe open quantum systems, which Howard Carmichael began during his masters.