Thomas M. Antonsen, Jr., is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and is jointly appointed in the Department of Physics, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics. He was educated at Cornell University and received his M.S. degree in 1976 and his Ph.D. degree in 1977 from Cornell's School of Electrical Engineering. His faculty advisor for his doctoral dissertation, Theoretical Problems in Plasma Heating, was Edward Ott. After Cornell, Antonsen held research positions at the Naval Research Lab and MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics, eventually becoming a member of the faculty at MIT's Physics Department. In 1980, he left MIT to join the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1984, he became a faculty member in both the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Physics. In 2017, Antonsen was appointed Distinguished University Professor, the highest appointment bestowed by the University of Maryland.
Professor Antonsen held visiting appointments with the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland; the University of Nottingham, Nottingham, U.K.; and the Institute de Physique Theorique, Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France. From 1998 to 2000, he was the Acting Director of the Institute for Plasma Research at the University of Maryland. During his distinguished career, he has authored and coauthored more than 600 journal articles. With Henry Freund, Antonsen coauthored the book Principles of Free-Electron Lasers, which is now in its fourth edition.1 Antonsen is well known for his research in plasma theory, the theory and design of high-power sources of coherent radiation, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and the theory of the interaction of intense laser pulses and plasmas. With colleagues at the Naval Research Laboratory, Antonsen developed widely used software tools for designing and simulating vacuum electronic devices that produce intense microwaves for applications such as plasma heating, radar, and communications.2
From 1998 to 2000, Antonsen served on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Plasma Science Society, and, in 2010, he was the Chair of the Division of Plasma Physics, American Physical Society. He served on the editorial boards of Physical Review Letters, Physics of Fluids, and Comments on Plasma Physics. In 1986, Antonsen was elected a Fellow of the Division of Plasma Physics, American Physical Society, and in 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Antonsen received the Department of Defense Robert L. Woods Award for Excellence in Vacuum Electronics Technology in 1999, the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Award in 2003, the UMD Clark School of Engineering Outstanding Faculty Research Award in 2004, the IEEE John R. Pierce Award for Excellence in Vacuum Electronics in 2016, and the 2022 IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award for outstanding contributions to the field of nuclear and plasma sciences and engineering.
The citation for the 2023 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics reads
“For pioneering contributions in the theory of magnetized plasma stability, RF current drive, laser-plasma interactions, and charged particle beam dynamics.”
Professor Thomas Antonsen's highly influential research works include time-dependent quantum chaos3 and time-asymptotic attractors in large systems of coupled oscillators4,5 with Edward Ott, the kinetic theory of low-frequency instabilities6,7 and particle transport8 in magnetized fusion plasma with Barton Lane and Bruno Coppi, self-focusing and kinetic modeling of laser pulses in tenuous plasma9–11 with Patrick Mora, high-beta shielding of tearing modes12 and nonlinear reduced fluid equations for toroidally magnetized plasma13 with James Drake, and the theory of relativistic backward-wave oscillators14 developed with Baruch Levush of the Naval Research Laboratory. Antonsen has been the author or co-author on nine invited papers to Special Issues from Annual Meetings of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, and his paper with Mora10 was highlighted as one of the most authoritative and groundbreaking papers in the first 50 years of Plasma Physics.15
The title of Professor Antonsen's Maxwell Prize address was “Adjoint Methods in Plasma Physics and Charged Particle Dynamics.” Antonsen provided simple illustrations of this powerful technique and concluded with timely and important applications to RF current drive in fusion tokamaks, noise in magnetized electron beams, and the sensitivity of three-dimensional stellarator equilibria to the surrounding magnetic fields.
