Studies of Optical Dephasing in Inorganic Glasses by Bill YEN and His Students and Colleagues——An Informal History

This note is a brief,informal account of Bill Yen's pioneering investigations of optical dephasing in inorganic glasses.The work,carried out at the University of Wisconsin by Bill,together with his graduate students,post-docs and colleagues,had great impact on the field and led directly to our current understanding of the various mechanisms for dephasing and how they are reflected in the temperature dependence of the homogeneous linewidth.