Bucksbaum spent his early childhood inGrinnell, a small farming and college community in south-central Iowa.[5] He graduated as the class valedictorian fromWashington High School inCedar Rapids in 1971.[6] He received a bachelor's degree in Physics fromHarvard College in 1975.[7] Bucksbaum attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving his Ph.D. in 1980.[8]
Bucksbaum joined the faculty of Stanford in 2005, with joint appointments in Physics, Applied Physics, and Photon Science.[10] He was named to the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Chair in Natural Science at Stanford in 2009,[11] and currently directs the PULSE Institute at Stanford and SLAC.[12][13]
Bucksbaum's graduate research at Berkeley was on the parity non-conserving neutralweak interaction in atomicthallium.[14][15] He co-authored a textbook on the larger subject ofelectroweak interactions after completing his doctoral thesis.[16]
AtBell Laboratories he became interested inultrafast and strong field laser-matter interactions. For a time, he co-held the record for the shortest wavelength coherent radiation produced in the laboratory.[17] He was one of the team that used similar methods to develop the first ultrafast angle-resolved vuv photoemission methods.[18]In 1985 he turned to the study of strong-field ionization of atoms. His early work onabove threshold ionization of atoms established the role ofponderomotive forces in laser-electron interactions through studies of electron surfing in ultrafast laser pulses as well as the high-intensityKapitsa–Dirac effect.[19] He also discovered and explained the mechanism ofbond softening in strong-field molecular dissociation.[20]His pioneering development of broadband coherentTHz radiation (so-called "half-cycle pulses")[21] helped to advance the field ofultrafast THz spectroscopy. He has subsequently used ultrafast lasers to study problems in quantum sculpting,[22] quantum information,[23] and coherent control of atomic and molecular dynamics.
Bucksbaum served terms on theAmerican Physical Society Executive Board, theOptical Society Board of Directors, and theNational Academy of Sciences Board on Physics and Astronomy, as well as its Committee on AMO Science (CAMOS). He chaired its Decal Study in AMO Science, AMO 2010.[26] He has been a member of advisory committees for theDepartment of Energy Division on Basic Energy Science (BESAC),NIST (Committee for Physics), TheNational Science Foundation, and Science Advisory Committees for the Advanced Light Source atBerkeley National Lab, the Advanced Photon Source atArgonne National Lab, and the Linac Coherent Light Source atSLAC National Accelerator Lab. As of 2013 he was Chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academy.
He has served on the Editorial Board ofPhysical Review Letters, and was the founding editor of theAmerican Institute of Physics Virtual Journal of Ultrafast Science.[27]At Stanford and SLAC, he has served as Chair of the Photon Science faculty[28] and Director of the Chemical Science Division.
^Commins, Eugene D. (1981). "Status of Experimental Searches for Parity Violation in Atoms". In Daniel Kleppner (ed.).Atomic Physics 7. New York: Springer. p. 121.doi:10.1007/978-1-4615-9206-8_5.ISBN978-1-4615-9208-2.
