Title: Generalized Lorenz-Mie theories and mechanical effects of laser light, a celebration of Arthur Ashkin’spioneering work in optical levitation and manipulation.

Biography:

G. Gouesbet  has  been working in light scattering, modeling of two-phase flows, non linear dynamics and chaos theory., and is the promoter of the well-known generalized Lorenz-Mie theory. He authored about 350 papers in journals and as a whole about 550 papers in journals and proceedings. His citation count in Google scholar is about 13 000 with a h-index of 58. He has been serving in numerous committees and is a honorary editor of Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer.

Abstract

The generalized Lorenz-Mie theory (GLMT, more generally GLMTs) [1] has been initially developed to address issues in optical particle characterization, more particularly in optical particle sizing, in order to simultaneously measure velocities and sizes of individual particles embedded in flows, with applications to spray combustion or plasma spraying, among others. This line of research, however, had two opportunities to meet another line of research, namely the one of Arthur Ashkin dealing with optical levitation, trapping and manipulation of macroscopic particles (such as droplets or beads), and who won a Nobel prize in physics last year. The first opportunity has been that GLMT (more generally GLMTs) is able to deal with mechanical effects of light whatever the size of particles and then indeed bridged the gap between the Rayleigh and ray optics regimes to which the theoretical part of the work of Arthur Ashkin was limited. The second opportunity has been that optical levitation experiments promoted by Arthur Ashkin have been used to experimentally test the validity of the GLMT. In this talk, as a celebration of Arthur Ashlin’s pioneering work concerning the mechanical effects of laser light, I shall offer a review and overview devoted to GLMTs and mechanical effects of laser light, both in Rouen where the GLMT has been built, and all over the world.