Florin Abelès (October 20, 1922 – April 12, 2005)[1] was a French physicist, specialized in optics.
In his 1949 doctoral thesis, Abelès developed a transfer-matrix formalism to compute the transmission and reflection of light by thin dielectric layers.
When Lyman G. Parratt performed the first x-ray reflectometry experiment in 1954, he developed an equivalent recursion method.
Nowadays, Abelès matrices or Parratt recursion are exchangeably used in investigations of multilayers by x-ray reflectometry, neutron reflectometry, or ellipsometry.
In 1969, Abelès founded the journal Optics Communications.