Leonard Mandel

Mandel was born into a Jewish family in Berlin that fled Nazi Germany for Britain, where he trained as a physicist before moving to the University of Rochester. He became a founder of experimental quantum optics, and his work with Emil Wolf and students produced landmark experiments — including the Hong–Ou–Mandel effect (1987) — that revealed the quantum nature of light and underpin modern quantum information science. He was widely regarded as one of the field's leading experimentalists.