Joseph J.M. Braat (born 5 November 1946) is a Dutch

optical engineer Optical engineering is the field of science and engineering encompassing the physical phenomena and technologies associated with the generation, transmission, manipulation, detection, and utilization of light. Optical engineers use optics to solve ...

and scientist. Between 1973 and 1998 he worked at

Philips Research Laboratories Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is ...

. He was professor of

optics Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultrav ...

Delft University of Technology Delft University of Technology ( nl, Technische Universiteit Delft), also known as TU Delft, is the oldest and largest Dutch public technical university, located in Delft, Netherlands. As of 2022 it is ranked by QS World University Rankings among ...

between 1998 and 2008.

Career

Braat was born in Breda on 5 November 1946. He studied physics at

. After his graduation he moved to France to work at the coherent optics group of Serge Lowenthal at the

Institut d'Optique The Institut d'optique Graduate School ("Institute of optics"), nicknamed SupOptique or IOGS, is one of the most prestigious French Grandes Ecoles and the leading French ''grande école'' in the field of Optics and its industrial and scientific ap ...

in Orsay. His PhD thesis was on

holography Holography is a technique that enables a wavefront to be recorded and later re-constructed. Holography is best known as a method of generating real three-dimensional images, but it also has a wide range of other applications. In principle, i ...

using spatially incoherent light. In 1973 Braat returned to the Netherlands to work at

. There he contributed to early research on

optical disc In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc (OD) is a flat, usually circular disc that encodes binary data (bits) in the form of pits and lands on a special material, often aluminum, on one of its flat surfaces. ...

systems. During this period he developed a theory together with Harold Hopkins and Gijs Bouwhuis on the read-out of optical discs through diffraction of light by the information carrying disc structure. He also contributed to the design of light paths for optical disc systems. At Philips Research Laboratories Braat contributed to

lens A lens is a transmissive optical device which focuses or disperses a light beam by means of refraction. A simple lens consists of a single piece of transparent material, while a compound lens consists of several simple lenses (''elements ...

and system design for early

photolithographic In integrated circuit manufacturing, photolithography or optical lithography is a general term used for techniques that use light to produce minutely patterned thin films of suitable materials over a substrate, such as a silicon wafer, to protect ...

systems by Philips and ASML. In 1988 Braat became a part-time professor of

geometrical optics Geometrical optics, or ray optics, is a model of optics that describes light propagation in terms of '' rays''. The ray in geometrical optics is an abstraction useful for approximating the paths along which light propagates under certain circumstan ...

. In 1998 he became a full professor of

. During this time he performed research on extreme ultraviolet lithography, optical

aperture synthesis Aperture synthesis or synthesis imaging is a type of interferometry that mixes signals from a collection of telescopes to produce images having the same angular resolution as an instrument the size of the entire collection. At each separation and ...

for astronomy, high density optical recording, Extended Nijboer-Zernike theory and Terahertz imaging. In 1991 Braat was one of the founders of the European Optical Society. From 2004 to 2006 he served as its President. Braat retired as professor in 2008. In 1994 Braat won the Edward Longstreth Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science of the

Franklin Institute The Franklin Institute is a science museum and the center of science education and research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is named after the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin. It houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memori ...

for "contributions to optical data recording and design of aspherical objective lenses for read-out systems of optical storage". Braat was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. He became a Fellow of the European Optical Society in 2012. Braat has been attributed 60 US patents.

Bibliography

Braat is the author or co-author of some 150 scientific publications. His main work is the 1000-page textbook ''Imaging Optics,'' which also contains contribution from second author Peter Török.

Books

* G. Bouwhuis, J. Braat, A. Huijser, J. Pasman, G. van Rosmalen, K.A.S. Immink, ''Principles of Optical Disc Systems'', Hilger, Bristol, UK (1985). * J. Braat, P. Török, ''Imaging Optics'', Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK (2019).

References

External links

Profile at Delft University of TechnologyProfile at KNAWExtended Nijboer-Zernike theory
{{DEFAULTSORT:Braat, Joseph 1946 births Living people Delft University of Technology alumni Delft University of Technology faculty Dutch engineers Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Optical engineers People from Breda