William Thomas Silfvast is an American physicist well known for his contributions to gas discharge lasers,[1][2] soft x-ray lasers,[3] and as the author of the influential textbook Laser Fundamentals.
Silfvast received his PhD in physics from the University of Utah and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford.
He then spent much of his career at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, with a Guggenheim Fellowship at Stanford in 1982–83.
Later he became a professor and chairman of the Physics Department at the University of Central Florida's Center for Research in Electro-Optics and Lasers (CREOL).
Silfvast remains a Professor Emeritus at UCF, and is now retired and living in Oregon.