| Linn Frederick Mollenauer | |
| Birth Date: | 6 January 1937 |
| Birth Place: | Washington, District of Columbia |
| Death Place: | Silver Spring, Maryland |
| Nationality: | American |
| Field: | Physics |
| Work Institution: | Bell Labs, UC Berkeley |
| Alma Mater: | Cornell University Stanford University |
Linn Frederick Mollenauer (1937–2021) was an American physicist who worked on quantum optics, including the study of solitons in fiber optics.[1]
Mollenauer was born on 6 January 1937.[1] He studied at Cornell University, receiving his doctorate in physics from Stanford University in 1965.[1] He taught for seven years at Berkeley, before embarking on a research career at Bell Labs from 1972.[1]
A key advance was in February 1993, when Mollenauer succeeding in transmitting "10 billion bits per second through 20,000 kilometres of fibers with a simple soliton system".[2]
In 1982, he received the R. W. Wood Prize.[3] In 1986, Mollenauer was awarded the Stuart Ballantine Medal.[4] Mollenauer was one of the recipients of the 1991 Rank Prize in Optoelectronics.[5] He received the Charles Hard Townes Award in 1997.[3] In 2001, he was the recipient of the Quantum Electronics Award of the IEEE Photonics Society.[6]
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1993.[7] He was elected a Fellow of Bell Labs in 2001.[1] He was also a fellow of the Optical Society of America.[3]
Mollenauer was co-author with James P. Gordon of the work Solitons in Optical Fibers: Fundamentals and Applications (2006) [8]
Mollenauer died on 28 July 2021.[1]