Amnon Yariv (born April 13, 1930) is an Israeli-American professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Caltech, known for innovations in optoelectronics.

[1] In 2010, Yariv was selected as a winner of the National Medal of Science for "scientific and engineering contributions to photonics and quantum electronics that have profoundly impacted lightwave communications and the field of optics as a whole".

In 1992 he was awarded the Harvey Prize by the Technion in Haifa, Israel, for "pioneering contributions to opto-electronics, wave propagation in crystals and nonlinear and phase-conjugate optics, and his demonstration of semiconductor-based integrated optics technology leading to the development of high-speed and stable solid-state lasers".

[citation needed] His work has also been recognized by the Optical Society of America.

[5][6] He has said that the highlight of his group's work was the invention of the semiconductor distributed feedback laser, a device widely used in the Internet's fiber-optic communications.