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Peter S. Pershan is an Americanphysicist.[1]
Peter Pershan earned hisB.S. atPolytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1956 and hisPh.D. inphysics atHarvard University in 1960 fornuclear magnetic resonance under the supervision ofNicolaas Bloembergen. After a short postdoctoral appointment with Bloembergen he was appointed an assistant professor at Harvard University, where he was the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science, at both Physics Department and Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He retired becoming emeritus in 2015.
Pershan began his career in nuclear magnetic resonance; however, beforemoving on to other things, he and Bloembergen produced some of the first papers onnon-linear optics, a field for which Bloembergen later receivedNobel Prize in Physics in 1981.
He remained active in this field until the early 1980s when he wrote a book onliquid crystals and moved into the then-new field ofsynchrotron radiation.
Along withJens Als-Nielsen, Pershan developed the first synchrotronX-ray reflectometer for the study of the horizontal free surface of a liquid, and carried out the first synchrotron measurements on liquid surfaces atHASYLAB,DESY in 1982. Theliquid surface spectrometers now atAdvanced Photon Source and theNational Synchrotron Light Source are all variations of the HASYLAB instrument.
Since 1982 Pershan has led the field in exploration of such diverse liquid surfaces assuperfluid helium,water, andliquid metals. Aside from sabbaticals at theUniversity of Paris,Brookhaven National Laboratory, andRisø National Laboratory Pershan has been atHarvard University (where he has been a faculty member since 1961) since he arrived as a graduate student in September 1956.
In addition to over 240 scientific articles Peter Pershan has published three books:
Liquid-crystal physicists, such as Peter Pershan of Harvard University, are studying these systems, using birefringence as well as quasielastic and Brillouin-scattering techniques developed for liquid crystals.
