Scienceאמנון יריב

Amnon Yariv

Amnon Yariv is an Israeli-American physicist and professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Caltech, known for his work in optoelectronics and lasers.

born 1930Semiconductor distributed feedback laserResearch in optoelectronicsFounding Ortel Corporation

Born: 13 April 1930, Tel Aviv
Occupation: physicist, engineer, electrotechnician, university teacher
Education: University of California, Berkeley

Amnon Yariv was born in 1930 in Tel Aviv

Yariv was born in 1930 in the Kerem HaTeimanim neighborhood of Tel Aviv. His parents, Shraga and Hania Yurborsky, had immigrated from Poland. He played basketball for Maccabi Atid and finished the science track at Geula high school.

During the War of Independence he served in an artillery unit at Latrun and was released in 1950. He began studying at the Technion that fall, then left a year later for the University of California, Berkeley. There he earned degrees in electrical engineering in 1954 and 1956 and a PhD on masers in 1958.

In 1960 he joined Bell Labs in New Jersey to research lasers with James Gordon. In 1964 he joined the Caltech faculty, and in 1967 he published Quantum Electronics. His group invented the semiconductor distributed feedback laser, used in fiber-optic communications.

He founded Ortel Corporation in 1980, which was sold to Lucent in 2000, and cofounded Orbits Lightwave in 1999. He registered about 60 patents. He lives in Pasadena, California, and has 3 daughters.