Marcis Auzinsh - Brief curriculum vitae#

Professor Marcis Auzinsh is a rector of the University of Latvia since August 2007. After completing his PhD. in physics (St. Petersburg State University in 1986), Marcis Auzinsh continued his academic and research career at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Latvia, taking administrative positions as Head of the Department of Physics (1997-2002), Director of Institute of Atomic Physics and Spectroscopy (1998-2003) and Dean of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics (2002-2007). From 1998 till 2007 he was the Chairman of the Senate of the University of Latvia. Currently he is the Rector of the University of Latvia. The research interests of professor Auzinsh are within the fields of atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics and laser spectroscopy of atoms and small molecules. In 2002 he organized the Laser Centre of the University of Latvia.

For extended time periods he has been a visiting professor and visiting researcher in several world known universities. He was a Royal Society visiting professor at Sussex University in 1995, a researcher in the Interdisciplinary Research Centre at the University of Bielefeld from 1996 to 1997, a visiting Professor at the University of Oklahoma in 1998 and a Miller research Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in 2005.

His original research results are published in 86 papers in SCI journals. Among them are 5 papers in Physical Review Letters, 14 in Physical Review A and 13 in the Journal of Chemical Physics. He has published around 150 book chapters, papers in conference proceedings, article collections and conference theses. The main results are summarized in two monographs. The first book, Optical Polarization of Molecules, printed at Cambridge University Press and written in collaboration with Prof. Ruvin Ferber, was published in 1995 and reprinted in 2005. In 2010 Oxford University Press published a second monograph, Optically Polarized Atoms: Understanding Light-Atom Interactions, which he wrote together with his colleagues form the University of California at Berkeley, Prof. Dmitry Budker and Mr. Simon Rochester.

Already during the work on his Master's Thesis, when he directly measured thermalization kinetics and the thermalization rate of diatomic molecules, Marcis Auzinsh achieved outstanding results that were published in leading physics journals. During his PhD Thesis work he discovered several previously unknown effects related to the manifestation of high rank multipole moments of quantum density matrices and additional structure in magneto-optical resonances in the polarization rate of the laser induced fluorescence of diatomic molecules that exceeded the classical limit. During the work on his second degree (Dr. Hab. Phys), he continued to investigate interesting effects such as angular momentum spatial distribution symmetry breaking (alignment to orientation conversion) in an external magnetic field and ground state quantum beats. He also devised a now widely used method to visualize a quantum density matrix in the form of an angular momentum spatial distribution probability surface.

He is a single author of a number of tutorial papers and co-author of several review papers.

After accepting a professorship at the University of Latvia, Prof. Marcis Auzinsh has been a supervisor of a large number (15) of PhD students. In collaboration with them interesting new effects continue to be studied. Among them are magneto-optical resonances in atoms – bright and dark resonances, alignment to orientation conversion in the presence of an electric field, magneto-optical resonances in nano-size optical cells, etc. This research is done in close collaboration with many science centres in countries such as the USA, Germany, Great Britain, France, Israel, Russia, Armenia and Bulgaria.

His achievements are recognized in the large number of national awards including the Large Medal of the Academy, the highest award of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, to which Marcis Auzinsh was elected as a full member in 1998, at that time being the youngest member of the Academy. He is a recipient of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Hanle prize in 1995.

Professor Auzinsh leads a large research group. He has been and still is a principal investigator on a large number of national projects (7) and projects funded by the European Commission (3), NATO (4), NSF (1) and bilateral projects (5), some of which are ongoing.

Currently he serves on the Executive Committee of the European Physical Society. He has been an expert and a Board Member of the European Physics Education Network – EUPEN (Socrates Network). Prof. M.Auzinsh has been a Board Member of the International Physics Olympiads since 1996 and has membership in the Latvian, European and American Physical Societies, as well as in the Institute of Physics (UK).