Rajeev J. Ram
Prof. Rajeev J. Ram (7 January (1990)‒) is head of the Physical Optics and Electronics Group at MIT.
He interests us for his early work on polariton lasers together with A. Ĭmamoḡlu, for which he credits himself as an originator, in his long list of achievements:
Note also the thresholdless laser in 1994.
He indeed has various papers as contenders for the claim, some of them quite famous. This includes in particular Ref. [1] (from which A. Ĭmamoḡlu is also, and in fact more commonly cited as the pioneer of this concept). This text and others rely on some "R.J. Ram and A. Imamoglu, unpublished" text, which is difficult to locate (it seems to be a conference proceedings,[2] with title "The exciton boser"; the only other candidate with this order of authors is a short two-page proceeding paper with the same title[3] but which only reproduces the main results from their other papers and in no way provides a «lengthy but straightforward […] derivation of the master equation» as promised in Ref. [1]).
Despite the appearance from his bibliography, his Ph.D adviser was not A. Ĭmamoḡlu but John Bowers, who is rewarded in his thesis for providing «intellectual freedom». A. Ĭmamoḡlu was, on the other hand, sitting in the tribunal (along with now Nobel prize nominee Herbert Kroemer).