Florin Abelès

Florin Abelès
Born	(1922-10-20)October 20, 1922 Galați, Romania
Died	April 12, 2005(2005-04-12) (aged 82) Paris, France
Nationality	French
Education	Ecole Supérieure d'Optique
Awards	Prix Louis Ancel, CEK Mees Medal from the Optical Society of America
Scientific career
Fields	Physics

Florin Abelès (October 20, 1922 – April 12, 2005) was a French physicist, specialized in optics.

In his 1949 doctoral thesis, Abelès developed a transfer-matrix formalism to compute the transmission and reflection of light by thin dielectric layers. When Lyman G. Parratt performed the first x-ray reflectometry experiment in 1954, he developed an equivalent recursion method. Nowadays, Abelès matrices or Parratt recursion are exchangeably used in investigations of multilayers by x-ray reflectometry, neutron reflectometry, or ellipsometry.

In 1969, Abelès founded the journal Optics Communications. He served as editor-in-chief until 1993.