CHESTNUT HILL, MA, August 27, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Thomas John Greytak, PhD, with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Greytak celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
While at high school in Seattle, Dr. Greytak found that he had an interest in math, physics, and chemistry. In addition to the material he learned in school he taught himself more advanced mathematics from a local educational television station. During the course of his formal education, he received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1963, both in Electrical Engineering. During this time, he spent his summers working as a co-op student at Bell Telephone Laboratories. During his first summer, Dr. Greytak designed transistor circuits using discrete elements packaged together into operational units such as amplifiers and counters. During the second summer, he worked in the group of Dr. Herwig Kogelnik that developed some of the first visible lasers. During the third summer, on a project suggested by Dr. Vincent Jaccarino, he measured the magnetic field penetration depth in the superconducting high temperature intermetallic compounds V3Si and tantalum, work which formed the basis of his Masters thesis.
By the time he returned to MIT Dr. Greytak had realized his true interests lay in science and changed his major to the Physics Department where he received his Doctor of Philosophy and joined the faculty in 1967.
Dr. Greytak formed an experimental condensed matter physics group using laser light scattering as a primary tool and eventually focusing his interests on physics near absolute zero. He used Brillouin scattering to measure the velocity of sound in matter at high frequency and to study the transition from hydrodynamic to kinetic behavior in gasses. In superfluid liquid He4 he used Brillouin scattering to study first and second sound, and critical behavior near the phase transition. He used Raman scattering to study the interaction between rotons, the high frequency elementary excitations in the superfluid He4.
During the academic year 1972-73 Dr. Greytak took a leave of absence to visit the low temperature laboratory of Professor John Wheatley at the University of California, San Diego. There he participated in the exploration of the thermodynamic phases and the behavior of the newly discovered superconducting state of liquid He3 below 3 mK.
Returning to MIT Dr. Greytak turned his attention to Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) in gasses. In collaboration with his atomic physics colleague Professor Daniel Kleppner (and a variety of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows) they pursued BEC in atomic hydrogen, the simplest of all gasses. They achieved this goal in 1998 at 50 mK, after more than 20 years of fruitful studies of atomic hydrogen at low temperatures using the techniques of evaporative cooling and 2 photon spectroscopy.
In his career, Dr. Greytak has served as an instructor, assistant, associate and full professor. He was the Division Head for Atomic, Condensed Matter and Plasma Physics from 1988 to 1997. From 1997 to June 2009 he was the Associate Department Head. Dr. Greytak retired in 2011 as the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics Emeritus.
Subsequently he has worked part-time on various projects for the Physics Department.
For his accomplishments throughout his career, Dr. Greytak shared the International BEC 2015 Senior Prize with Daniel Kleppner and Harald Hess (their postdoc). At MIT he received the Buechner Teaching Prize, and the MIT School of Science Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
As a dedicated educator, Dr. Greytak has most enjoyed hearing from former students who have all done well in their careers. Of his 29 PhD graduates, 6 are women. He has maintained his professional affiliations as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, and of the American Physical Society.
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