Heidrun Schmitzer

Heidrun Schmitzer
Residence	Regensburg, Germany

Heidrun Schmitzer is a German-born experimental physicist and Professor of Physics in the Physics and Engineering Department at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her research is in optics and plasmonics, with particular emphasis on nonlinear optics, polarization optics and quantum optics.

Biography

Schmitzer earned her doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) in optics and solid state physics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Dultz. She subsequently worked on research projects in fiber and polarization optics for the German Telekom in Frankfurt, and taught for two years at the Montessori School in Regensburg. From 2000 to 2001 she was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Chemnitz, holding a postdoctoral fellowship from the State of Saxony. She joined the physics faculty at Xavier University in 2002.

At Xavier she coordinates the department's study abroad program with the Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule (OTH) in Regensburg, which allows applied physics and engineering physics students to spend one or two semesters in Germany.

Work

Schmitzer's early research, carried out with Wolfgang Dultz and S. Klein, concerned the Pancharatnam–Berry geometric (topological) phase in polarization optics. This work included the demonstration of the nonlinearity of Pancharatnam's topological phase (Physical Review Letters, 1993), the tuning of an optical interference filter using the topological phase, and an experimental test of the path dependency of Pancharatnam's geometric phase (1998).

Her later work has covered nonlinear optical waveguides and second- and third-harmonic generation, optical trapping and the transfer of angular momentum from light to small birefringent particles, quantum optical interferometry with single photons and biphotons, plasmonic metal/dielectric multilayer waveguides, and the optical properties and lasing behavior of semiconductor nanowire photonic crystal arrays. She has also published physics education work, including undergraduate optical diffraction experiments reproducing Rosalind Franklin's X-ray photograph of DNA.

She holds a number of patents in optics, and has received the Women of Excellence Grant (2009, 2016), a technology grant for the development of a high-speed camera laboratory (2015), grants from the Research Corporation for the Advancement of Science (2005, 2008), and Xavier's Wheeler Award for curriculum development (2005).

Selected publications

• "Nonlinearity of Pancharatnam's Topological Phase", Physical Review Letters, 1993
• "Pancharatnam's Phase in Polarization Optics", in Advanced Electromagnetism: Foundations, Theory, Applications, 1995
• "An experimental test of the path dependency of Pancharatnam's geometric phase", Journal of Modern Optics, 1998
• "Measurement of the helicity of photon pairs using the optical Berry phase", Physics Letters A, 2002
• "Observation of the transfer of the local angular momentum density to an optically trapped particle", Physical Review Letters, 2003
• "Achromatic wavefront forming with space-variant polarizers", Physical Review A, 2007
• "Irregular spin angular momentum transfer from light to small birefringent particles", Physical Review A, 2009
• "How Rosalind Franklin discovered the helical structure of DNA", The Physics Teacher, 2011
• "Controlling guided modes in plasmonic metal/dielectric multilayer waveguides", Journal of Applied Physics, 2015
• "Lasing from InP Nanowire Photonic Crystals on InP Substrate", Advanced Optical Materials, 2020
• "Polarization Conversion of Light Diffracted from InP Nanowire Photonic Crystal Arrays", Advanced Optical Materials, 2023

External links

• Faculty page at Xavier University
• Publication list at Xavier University