Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels (18 June 1865 – 29 August 1913) was a German physicist.
He was born in Italy to Captain Theodore Pockels and Alwine Becker.
Pockels studied under the guidance of Woldemar Voigt, who was a physicist working on the general phenomena of piezoelectricity and pyroelectricity.
[1] In 1893 he discovered that a steady electric field applied to certain birefringent materials causes the refractive index to vary, approximately in proportion to the strength of the field.
Pockels was awarded the prize of the Heidelberg Jubilee Foundation for the Encouragement of Scientific Research in 1906.