John Hall Elected OSA Honorary Member

The OSA board of directors recently elected Nobel Laureate John L. Hall as an honorary member of the society for his pioneering work on high-precision laser metrology and fundamental optical tests of physical principles. Hall is a senior fellow emeritus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and an adjoint fellow of JILA (formerly the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics), an institute run by NIST and the University of Colorado-Boulder. Hall is known as a preeminent laser experimentalist who has contributed significantly to the development of the laser from a laboratory curiosity to one of the fundamental tools of modern science. His work has concentrated on improving the precision and accuracy with which lasers can produce a specific frequency and the stability with which they can hold that frequency. He has won more than 20 awards for his work, including the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with T.W. Hänsch and Roy Glauber for contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique. Hall has been an active member of OSA since 1976 and a fellow since 1979. He will be recognized at OSA's annual meeting, Frontiers in Optics, to be held in Sept. 16-20 in San Jose, Calif., where he will also be a plenary speaker.