Carlos Stroud

Carlos Ray Stroud, Jr. (born July 9, 1942, in Owensboro, KY) is an American physicist and an educator. A pioneer in the field of quantum optics, Stroud has carried out theoretical and experimental studies in most areas of the field from its beginnings in the late 1960s, studying the fundamentals of the quantum mechanics of atoms and light and their interaction. He has authored over 140 peer-reviewed papers and edited seven books. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, as well as a Distinguished Traveling Lecturer of the Division of Laser Science of the American Physical Society. In this latter position he travels to smaller colleges giving colloquia and public lectures.
Life and career.
Carlos Stroud grew up in Kentucky and graduated from Centre College in 1963, with degrees in mathematics and physics. In 1969 he earned a Ph.D. in physics from Washington University, under the mentorship of E. T. Jaynes, with the thesis titled Quantum and Semiclassical Radiation Theory. In 1969 Stroud joined the faculty of The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. Over his 50-year career at the University of Rochester, Professor Stroud taught undergraduate and graduate courses in general and quantum physics and optics, while conducting groundbreaking research in several areas of quantum optics, graduating 30 Ph.D.s. He was named Professor of Optics in 1984 and Professor of Physics and Astronomy in 1991.
In 2004, Stroud collected and edited "A Jewel in the Crown: Essays in Honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Institute of Optics", a compilation of 75 essays on the history of the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics (19 of the essays were authored or co-authored by Stroud himself). In 2019, Stroud and Gina Kern co-edited "A Jewel in the Crown II: Essays in Honor of the 90th Anniversary of the Institute of Optics". For his contributions in gathering and documenting the Institute of Optics' history, on his retirement on July 1, 2019, Stroud was named Professor Emeritus of Optics and Optics Historian.
Professional contributions.
Soon after joining the faculty of the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, Stroud collaborated with Michael Hercher, developing the first single-mode tunable dye laser and using it to study its interaction with sodium atoms in an atomic beam. This work produced a series of groundbreaking experiments, including the study of the hyperfine structure of the D-lines, the isolation of a closed two-level resonance, power broadening, and resonance fluorescence in this system. This first observation of the Mollow sidebands in resonance fluorescence was fundamental to understanding of the nature of quantum correlations in a coherently pumped two-level system. It is noteworthy that groups at MIT and the Max Planck Institute in Garching were also racing to be first to observe this spectrum, and did indeed confirm the initial results.
These experimental observations were soon followed by two-laser studies of three-level quantum systems. The first cw study of the Autler–Townes effect, and the first experimental study of the extremely sharp resonance associated with coherent population trapping were made. This observation led to the later development of electromagnetically induced transparency by Harris and others, as well as Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP). These pioneering experimental studies were accompanied by theoretical papers providing the underpinning concepts and models, and introducing much of the standard terminology of the fields, including “lambda”, “v”, and “cascade” for describing three-level configurations, “coherent population trapping” as well as introducing, with Cohen-Tannoudji, the dressed-state basis for resonance fluorescence and Autler-Townes studies.
In a series of some 50 papers from the early 1980s well into the 2000s, Stroud’s group studied the production and evolution of spatially localized electron wave packetsmade up of superpositions of Rydberg atomic states. These states are quite classical in their behavior, travelling several orbits around the nucleus as effectively Keplerian systems, but after a few orbits the packets demonstrate their quantum nature by undergoing decays, revivals and fractional revivals. In a fractional revival the initial wave packet splits into a set of smaller wave packets moving in the classical orbit. Parker and Stroud were the first to predict these fractional revivals, which were then observed by Yeazell and Stroud. This whole series of studies showed how a quantum system could be manipulated in a very controlled fashion to alternatively show classical and quantum features during a complex time evolution. A single electron could be made to interfere with itself to exhibit interference fringes, or to move like a classical localized particle. By the application of Stark fields and THz half-cycle pulses, the electrons could even be made to oscillate, while localized along a linear orbit some 1000 Angstroms in length.