Abraham Szöke, who did groundbreaking work in quantum optics, laser fusion, high-energy-density (HED) physics, and x-ray crystallography, died from complications of lymphoma on 26 January 2017.
Born in Budapest, Hungary, on 1 December 1929, Szöke was an excellent student in mathematics and science who placed near the top of the famous Eötvös mathematics competition. He survived the Holocaust, and in 1949 he escaped from Communist Hungary and emigrated to Israel. He earned his doctorate in physics, with Saul Meiboom and William Low as his advisers, in 1962 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As part of his thesis, he made the first measurement demonstrating the effect of radiation damping on nuclear magnetic resonance and its relation to transient maser action; that effect had been predicted a few years earlier by Nicolaas Bloembergen and Robert Pound.
As a postdoc, Szöke worked in Ali Javan’s famed laser group at MIT. He then held a staff position at the Weizmann Institute of Science, followed by associate professorships at MIT and Tel Aviv University. In the 1970s he returned to the US as a visiting professor at MIT and then was a visiting fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) in Boulder, Colorado.
In the 1960s and 1970s, in collaboration with many colleagues and students, Szöke made numerous breakthroughs in laser physics. He trained several scientists who became leaders in laser physics and inertial fusion. In tuning a gas laser, Szöke made the first observation of the ”Lamb dip” and gave a simple interpretation of it. He did the first experiments on laser-induced double resonance and its connection to the Hanle effect.
With his student Charles Rhodes, Szöke was the first to observe self-induced transparency in a molecule, sulfur hexafluoride. He also made some of the earliest measurements of the excited-state interactions between noble-gas molecules. Szöke and coauthors Vincenzo Daneu, Julius Goldhar, and Norman Kurnit were the first to demonstrate and explain the operating principles of optical bistable device elements. At JILA, as part of John Cooper’s group, Szöke did influential studies of the saturation of atomic resonances with John Carlsten and Michael Raymer. He also worked with Eric Courtens on the time-domain analysis of resonance scattering and fluorescence.
In 1976 Szöke was recruited to be a member of the advanced lasers group in the rapidly growing laser fusion program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He served for several years as the associate leader of the lab’s theoretical division.
At LLNL, he initially focused on the lasers that would be needed for inertial fusion. In another first, he, John Murray, Goldhar, and David Eimerl predicted and demonstrated pulse compression in backward stimulated Raman scattering. It was an important effect in the development of drivers for laser fusion experiments and predated by several decades many contemporary efforts in the field. His work with Donald Prosnitz and V. Kelvin Neil on design considerations for high-gain, free-electron lasers also proved very influential.
Extremely talented and effective at experimental work and at theory and algorithm development, Szöke, with numerous collaborators, had a big influence on the early advancement of short-pulse lasers and their application to harmonic generation, multiphoton ionization, and the controlled generation of HED plasmas. He made seminal contributions in conceptualizing various high-power, laser-driven platforms for studying a range of HED issues. That work formed an important part of the technical basis for science-based stockpile stewardship in an era of no nuclear device testing.
Although Szöke officially retired from LLNL in the early 1990s, he continued to work at the lab. In addition to HED physics, he made significant contributions to fields as diverse as x-ray crystallography, in which he collaborated with his wife, Hanna, and biological catalysis, in which he worked with Janos Hajdu. He also collaborated with Joel Parks at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University on trapped-ion dynamics. In a tour-de-force experiment done at LLNL in 1992, Szöke, Taylor Lawrence, and Robert Laughlin showed that cuprate high-Tc superconductors do not exhibit circular dichroism. Their demonstration that time-reversal symmetry was not broken in the superconducting phase of those materials ruled out several of the leading high-Tc theories based on anyons.
Szöke’s contribution to x-ray crystallography deserves particular mention. Starting in the late 1980s, he had the novel idea of treating x-ray diffraction data on crystals and individual particles as a kind of hologram. That insight led to new, effective algorithms now being applied to imaging individual biomolecules with x-ray free-electron lasers.
Szöke loved traveling, music, and running. Into their seventies, he and Hanna ran half marathons and astonished their much younger friends by beating them. His family, colleagues, students, and friends best remember him for his kindness. As a thesis adviser—both formal and informal—and scientific collaborator, he was always friendly, encouraging, and willing to share his ideas and insights.
A curious, creative scientist who always asked penetrating questions and had an extraordinary ability for making far-reaching discoveries, Szöke leaves us with a great legacy.
