(James) Roy Taylor (born 1949) is Professor of Ultrafast Physics and Technology at Imperial College London.

Education

Larne Grammar School. Taylor was educated at

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where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics in 1971 followed by a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in laser physics in 1974 for research supervised by Daniel Joseph Bradley.

Research and career

Taylor is widely acknowledged for his influential basic research on and development of diverse lasers systems and their application. He has contributed extensively to advances in

picosecond A picosecond (abbreviated as ps) is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to 10−12 or (one trillionth) of a second. That is one trillionth, or one millionth of one millionth of a second, or 0.000 000 000 ...

and

femtosecond A femtosecond is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to 10 or of a second; that is, one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth, of a second. For context, a femtosecond is to a second as a second is to about 31. ...

dye laser technology, compact diode-laser and fibre-laser-pumped vibronic lasers and their wide-ranging application to fundamental studies, such as time resolved photophysics of resonant energy transfer and relaxation pathways of biological probes and organic field-effect transistors. Taylor is particularly noted for his fundamental studies of ultrafast nonlinear optics in fibres, with emphasis on

solitons In mathematics and physics, a soliton or solitary wave is a self-reinforcing wave packet that maintains its shape while it propagates at a constant velocity. Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium ...

, their amplification, the role of noise and self-effects, such as Raman gain. Through his integration of seeded, high-power fibre amplifiers and passive fibre he has demonstrated far-reaching versatility in pulse duration, repetition rate and spectral coverage. He contributed extensively to the development of high power supercontinuum or “white light” sources, which have been a scientific and commercial success.

Awards and honours

Taylor's work has been recognized by the Ernst Abbe Award of the Carl Zeiss Foundation in 1990, the Young Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics (IOP) in 2007, the

Rumford Medal The Rumford Medal is an award bestowed by Britain's Royal Society every alternating year for "an outstandingly important recent discovery in the field of thermal or optical properties of matter made by a scientist working in Europe". First awar ...

from the Royal Society in 2012 and the

Faraday Medal and Prize The Michael Faraday Medal and Prize is a gold medal awarded annually by the Institute of Physics in experimental physics. The award is made "for outstanding and sustained contributions to experimental physics." The medal is accompanied by a pr ...

of the Institute of Physics in 2019. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

References

Physicists from Northern Ireland Fellows of the Royal Society Academics of Imperial College London Alumni of Queen's University Belfast Living people 1949 births {{Scientist-stub