Theo Rasing - Biography#

Theo Rasing (26 May 1953, Didam) obtained his degree in physics (cum laude) from Radboud University Nijmegen in 1976, where he also gained his doctorate in 1982. After postdoctoral stays at UC Berkeley (IBM fellowship) he became staff scientist and deputy program leader at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, where he pioneered nonlinear optical techniques for surface and interface studies. In 1988 he was appointed associate and in 1997 full professor of physics in Nijmegen. He is the founder and director of the Nijmegen Centre for Advanced Spectroscopy (NCAS), member of the board of the DutchNanoNed and founder of NanoLab Nijmegen that makes its expertise and infrastructure available to the commercial sector.

In 2007 he received the Physica Prize from the Netherlands Physics Society and in 2008 the Spinoza price, the highest scientific award from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO for his breakthroughs in the field of manipulating magnetism with light. In 2009 he became Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE, and in 2010 “Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion” and elected member of the Netherlands Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). To date, his research has yielded more than 350 publications in international journals, including Nature, Science and Physical Review Letters which have been cited over 6000 times (h=40). He is initiator and coordinator of various large national and international partnership programmes.

Theo Rasing is world renowned for his pioneering research on the manipulation of magnetism using light, where he demonstrated that short (less than 100 femtosecond) optical pulses can generate equally short effective magnetic field pulses of several Tesla, that form a unique tool for the study and control of ultrafast magnetization and spin dynamics (Nature 2004, Nature 2005). His demonstration of all-optical recording of magnetic bits (Physical Review Letters 2007) was one of the Breakthroughs of the year, Science 2007.