Autobiography of Shaul Mukamel.

I was born in Baghdad, Iraq, on December 11, 1948. Mesopotamia, now Iraq, had an old Jewish community that dated back 2600 years from the time of the destruction of the first Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews of Mesopotamia excelled as merchants, craftsmen, and rabbinic scholars. They created the Talmud, an important analysis of the Jewish legal code. The vast majority of the Jews immigrated to the state of Israel when it was created, leaving behind their long history, their property, and their ancestors. One of mine, Rabbi Isaac Salem Mukamel, had written a few books. “Netivot Issac”, printed in Jerusalem in 1923 and circulated in Baghdad, predicts the lunar calendar and eclipses for many years into the future. The lunar calendar is used by Jewish religious scholars, to identify the time for yearly holidays and daily prayers. My family immigrated to Israel in 1951, and I grew up in Tel Aviv. Israel’s economy was weak in the early 1950s. The country was absorbing new immigrants, and the infrastructure had yet to be developed. My parents, Meir and Marcel, made acquiring the very best possible education for me andmy two older brothers and sister their highest priority despite considerable financial difficulties in making a living from a grocery store. High school tuition was prohibitively high, and getting all of us through school was a major challenge. Municipal School A, my high school in Tel Aviv, was unique. The teachers were mostly passionate new immigrants with extremely highqualifications,many ofwhomheld Ph.D.’s. The school had very high standards, placed a strong emphasis on science, and offered numerous opportunities for extracurricular activities. Former graduates of the school from my generation have gone on to assume top positions in academia, business, government, medicine, politics, and journalism. (Joshua Jortner and Raoul Kopelman were classmates in the same school some years earlier.) Science was highly valued in Israeli society. The first President (Dr. Chaim Weitzman) was a chemist, and Albert Einstein was offered the presidency (which he declined). Scientists were respected and played important roles in the formation of the new state of Israel. I began undergraduate studies after graduating from high school in 1966 at the newly created department of chemistry of Tel Aviv University. The department was led by Joshua Jortnerwho came from theChicago School ofChemical Physics and attracted many young highly motivated and energetic faculty. I graduated in 1969 and then did my master thesis with Uzi Kaldor, working on electronic structure calculations of the excited states and electronic spectroscopy of He2. Computer codes in those days were written on decks of punch cards. Afterwards, I joined the group of Joshua Jortner towork onmyPh.D. The groupwas vibrant and very large by Israeli (and international) standards with about 20 members. There was a constant flow of stimulating visitors from all over the world and at all levels. Joshua was a great advisor with a deep, broad grasp of chemistry and physics and a limitless, infectious, and optimistic enthusiasm. Since he held numerous administrative positions, including the vice presidency of theUniversity, weworked mostly at night, often until the earlymorning hours, to the dismay of his wife, Ruth. I vividly remember Richard Bensohn fromColumbia University who visited regularly and insisted on giving a graduate class using his Biblical Hebrew. The students protested and requested that the class be given in English. I started to work on the theory of radiationless transitions and the photophysics of organic molecules in the condensed phase, following the earlier pioneering work of Bixon and Jortner and Rudy Marcus’s theory of electron transfer. Among my contemporary graduate students were Abe Nitzan with whom I collaborated on the study of vibrational relaxation (a highly cited work to date) and Yosi Klafter. Jortner used to work very closely with one of his star students who was the most productive at the time and paid very little attention to everyone else. I had to wait until Nitzan graduated in order to receive his full attention, and Klafter had to wait until I graduated. The department was truly international and offered an unusually stimulating environment. I also greatly appreciated the many opportunities I had to attend conferences, workshops, and schools in Europe, and even Brazil. One experience that completely changed my perspective and opened my eyes to the most advanced contemporary research in optics and spectroscopy was a three month winter school held at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste in 1971 that was led by Alfred Kastler who had received the 1966 Nobel Prize for his optical pumping work (a combination of optical and magnetic resonance in atoms). The center’s director, Mohammad Abdus Salam, was closely engaged in the school activities. Kastler had made a very careful choice of speakers. He attended all the lectures andmade wonderful and insightful comments. Among the lecturers were Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Jean Brossel, Gerhard Herzberg, and SergeHaroche. This school exposedme to the French School of Atomic Physics and Quantum Optics and completely changed my scientific career. I was impressed by Herzberg’s encyclopedic memory and his deep understanding of molecular spectra. He showed many unmarked slides of spectra of different molecules in his lectures and analyzed them and their symmetries without any notes, simply by inspection. His only difficulty was to persuade the Italian projectionist to go back occasionally to the previous slide. He desperately repeated “primera fotographica”, which I understood perfectly, but the projectionist did not. The Frontiers in Laser Spectroscopy Summer School in Les Houches in 1975was also instrumental in shapingmy futurework.Many exciting topics such as superfluoresence were discussed. Among the speakers were Hermann Haken, Roy Glauber, and Leo Kadanoff. I published several articles in J. Chem. Phys. during my graduate studies. I recall submitting one longmanuscript including 30 figures which the referee politely recommended be considerably shortened. Jortner’s reply was that we completely agreed with all the useful recommendations of the referee and were able to eliminate Figure 19C. The paper was accepted by the legendary editorWillard Stout, and that was a great lesson to me: Never argue with referees. My interest at the time focused on the theory of molecular photodissociation. I developed Green’s function time domain