F. J. Duarte is a Chilean-born laser physicist, inventor, and book author. He has been based in the United States since 1983.

He graduated with First Class Honours in physics from Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), in 1978, where he was a student of the quantum and particle physicist J. C. Ward.  At Macquarie he also completed his PhD research, on optically-pumped molecular lasers, in 1981. He then became a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales, where he built UV tunable lasers for high-resolution IR-UV double-resonance spectroscopy. Duarte has worked and contributed professionally in the academic, industrial, and defense sectors and has practiced physics in Australia, the Americas, and Europe.  Notable in his career is his tenure at the Eastman Kodak Company (1985-2006) where he led the Imaging and Spectral Measurements Laboratory.   He is the author of numerous refereed papers and US patents.

Duarte is editor/author of 16 scholarly books including Dye Laser Principles (1990),  High-Power Dye Lasers (1991), Tunable Lasers Handbook (1995), Tunable Laser Applications (1995, 2009, 2016), and Organic Lasers and Organic Photonics (2018). He is co-author of Quantum Entanglement Engineering and Applications (2021) and sole author of Tunable Laser Optics (2003, 2015), Quantum Optics for Engineers (2014), and Fundamentals of Quantum Entanglement (2019, 2022).  Duarte has made original contributions in the fields of coherent imaging, directed energy, extremely-expanded laser beams (up to 2000:1), high-power tunable lasers, laser metrology, liquid and polymer-nanoparticle organic gain media, narrow-linewidth tunable laser oscillators, N-slit quantum interferometry, electrically-pumped organic semiconductor coherent emission, quantum entanglement, and space-to-space interferometric communications. He is also the author of the generalized multiple-prism grating dispersion theory and has pioneered the use of Dirac’s quantum notation in interferometry and classical optics.

His contributions have found applications in atomic physics, astronomy, chemistry, cytology, electrophoresis, femtosecond laser microscopy, geodesics, geophysics, gravitational lensing, heat transfer, imaging, laser isotope separation, laser medicine, laser pulse compression, laser spectroscopy, mathematical transforms, nanoengineering, nanophotonics, nonlinear optics, optofluidics, organic semiconductor lasers, phase imaging, polarization rotation, quantum computing, quantum entanglement, quantum philosophy, space exploration, and tunable diode laser design. Current interests include tunable laser physics, interferometry via Dirac’s notation, and the foundations of quantum entanglement.

Duarte was elected  Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics in 1987.  In 1981 he joined OSA, following publication of one of his papers in Applied Optics, and was elected Fellow in 1993.  He has received Optica's Engineering Excellence Award (1995), for the invention of the N-slit laser interferometer, and the David Richardson Medal (2016) “for seminal contributions to the  physics and technology of multiple-prism arrays for narrow-linewidth tunable laser oscillators and laser pulse compression” from Optica.