William A Challener Author

William A. Challener, Ph.D., is an industrial physicist. After completing his doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for two years studying the far infrared properties of various materials. Following that, he joined 3M to conduct research in rewritable optical data storage where he worked for eleven years. In the Imation spin-off from 3M, he continued his research for four years in the application of surface plasmon physics to novel gas and biosensors. Transferring to the Seagate research center, he worked for nine years on perhaps his most commercially successful endeavor where he invented the lollipop near field transducer and the planar solid immersion lens that led to the first demonstration of heat-assisted magnetic recording. He was awarded the International Storage Industry Consortium technical achievement award in 2007 and was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013. He completed his research career at General Electric, working on a variety of projects involving fiber optics, optical sensors, and quantum optics, and retired after ten years during the covid pandemic. He has received 94 U.S. patents and authored or co-authored about 60 journal articles and a text on surface plasmon physics. He currently develops optical modeling software for his company, Junonia Photonics, and is a part-time consultant.