Linn Frederick Mollenauer (1937–2021) was an American physicist who worked on quantum optics, including the study of solitons in fiber optics.
[1] He taught for seven years at Berkeley, before embarking on a research career at Bell Labs from 1972.
[1] A key advance was in February 1993, when Mollenauer succeeding in transmitting "10 billion bits per second through 20,000 kilometres of fibers with a simple soliton system".
[3] In 2001, he was the recipient of the Quantum Electronics Award of the IEEE Photonics Society.
[3] Mollenauer was co-author with James P. Gordon of the work Solitons in Optical Fibers: Fundamentals and Applications (2006) [8] Mollenauer died on 28 July 2021.