Robert Spreeuw

Robert Spreeuw has been an associate professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam since 1996. He earned his PhD in physics at Leiden University in 1991, and he did postdoctoral research at NIST Gaithersburg and then at University of Konstanz. Professor Spreeuw has made significant contributions to the field of physics, as he has been published 125 times, and his research has been cited in thousands of other research papers.  Spreeuw was on the research team for a 1992 paper on donut-modes of laser beams, Orbital angular momentum of light and transformation of Laguerre Gaussian Laser modes, which was recently chosen as a “Classic Paper” by the Physical Review Journal. Their paper was given another honor when it was included in the journal’s 50^th Anniversary Milestone Collection, which selects papers that have made a significant contribution to the field of atomic, molecular and optical physics and quantum information. 

In a more recent paper, “Off-Axis Dipole Forces in Optical Tweezers by an Optical Analog of the Magnus Effect” published December 1^st, 2020, Spreeuw et al. showed that the Magnus effect, which causes spinning soccer or baseballs to curve, also applies to much smaller objects such as atoms or anything else that has a dipole moment. If the atom moves through a beam of light, then the light will exert a pressure on it, as air does for a soccer ball, resulting in a sideways force. One practical application of this discovery is that it allows physicists to be more precise when using optical tweezers which are used to move individual atoms because the optical tweezers experience the Magnus effect, and this knowledge can help them better predict how the atoms will behave. 

References 

 

https://www.miragenews.com/robert-spreeuw-s-donut-mode-paper-in-milestone-collection/

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Spreeuw/2

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.233201

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-photonic-curveball-real-world-examples-soccer.html?deviceType=desktop

https://nl.linkedin.com/in/robert-spreeuw-b242197?trk=people-guest_people_search-card