User:RPaschotta

I am Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta, living in Bad Dürrheim, Germany. I am mainly contributing to Wikipedia in the fields of optics and lasers (see below), but may also become active in some other areas.

Profession
My professional education is in physics. After studying physics in Konstanz, Germany, and also doing my Ph. D. there (in 1994), I spent a about two very pleasant and fruitful years as a post-doc at Optoelectronics Resesarch Centre, Southampton, England. After a short stay at the University of Paderborn, Germany, I moved on to Zürich, Switzerland, to join ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) as a senior research assistant in Nov. 1997. I worked there until mid 2005, leading a research group which worked on the development of mode-locked lasers. These lasers are designed to generate ultrashort pulses of light, either with very high average powers or with ultrahigh pulse repetition rates. It was a great pleasure to do interesting scientific work with a group of highly talented Ph. D. students, who were working together in an enjoyable atmosphere of respect, trust and mutual support.

In 2004, I founded a technical consulting company named RP Photonics Consulting GmbH, and in mid 2005 I started to work full time in that company. In 2010, we moved to Bad Dürrheim, Germany.

The main areas of my expertise are various kinds of lasers (including bulk lasers, fiber optics, fiber lasers, and semiconductor lasers), the generation of laser pulses with mode locking or Q switching, fiber amplifiers, nonlinear optics, and noise in optics.

More details on me can be found on my company website - see the page on the founder. Also not that I am the author of the Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology (see the external link below).

Other interests
Being a scientist can be great fun, but there is certainly more to life. Some of my main interests are:


 * Music, with a special affinity to the work of Johann Sebastian Bach, but also a strong interest in significant parts of the romantic period and in 20th century music (e.g. Paul Hindemith). Playing the violin and the organ.


 * The boundary between music and physics


 * Politics, without being associated to a party, thinking e.g. about the functioning (and malfunctioning) of democracy


 * Energy, considering aspects like limited supplies, environmental effects, new technologies, sensible policies, etc. I have published a German encyclopedia on energy matters (see the link below).