Joseph H. Apfel

Joseph H. Apfel is a Fellow of Optica and recipient of the 1995 Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize “for tireless efforts to simplify the theoretical underpinning of optical thin films and for casting design rules into graphical forms that can be easily manipulated without extensive computations.”

Apfel attended the University of California at Berkeley where he received BA, MA, and PhD degrees in physics. In 1959 he joined General Atomic in La Jolla, California, and in 1961 moved to Optical Coating Laboratory in Santa Rosa, California. Named director of research in 1969 and chief technical officer in 1988, he retired in 1992.

During the 1960s, Apfel participated in the development of rugged infrared coatings, circular variable filters, and reactive evaporation processes for visible and ultraviolet coatings in cooperation with Alfred Thelen and Rolf Illsley. In the late 1960s, he began the theoretical studies of interference phenomena and simplified methods to predict the behavior of thin film interference coatings for which he is best known. His publications on graphical methods for design are standard references for many thin film engineers.