Festschrift in honor of Yuen-Ron Shen

Y. Ron Shen is a renowned physicist who has made pioneering and seminal contributions to the development of nonlinear optics and its applications to the study of surfaces and interfaces.

Shen was a pioneer in the development of concepts and experimental verification in nonlinear optics. In his earlier career, he was best known for his work on self-focusing and filament propagation of laser beams in materials, which eventually enabled the creation of ultrafast supercontinuum light sources. He was the first, starting in the 1980s, in experimentally demonstrating the various nonlinear optics methods for the study of material surfaces and interfaces. Among these techniques, second-harmonic generation and sum frequency generation vibrational spectroscopy are best known and now widely used by scientists from various fields ranging from physics to chemistry to biology. He is the author of the books The Principles of Nonlinear Optics and Second Harmonic and Sum Frequency Spectroscopy: Basics and Applications.

To honor Shen and in conjunction of the 2023 International Conference on “Nonlinear Optics at Interfaces” hold in Rome, Italy in June 2023, a special issue will be published featuring contributions from leading scientists in the development of nonlinear optical spectroscopy and applications to problems associated with surfaces and interfaces. This issue will showcase the significant impact that Shen has made on the field of chemical physics, in particular nonlinear optical spectroscopy, and its applications to studies of surfaces and interfaces.

Guest Editors: Eric Borguet, Hai-Lung Dai, Tony Heinz, Jer-Lai Kuo, and Weitao Liu with JCP Editor Mischa Bonn.