|
Arthur Leonard Schawlow
(1921 - 1999)
American physicist and corecipient, with Nicolaas Bloembergen of the
United States and Kai Manne Borje Siegbahn of Sweden, of the 1981 Nobel
Prize for Physics for his work in developing the laser and in laser
spectroscopy.
As a child, Schawlow moved with his family to Canada. He attended the
University of Toronto, receiving his Ph.D. in 1949. In that year he
went to Columbia University, where he began collaborating with Charles
Townes on the development of masers, lasers, and laser spectroscopy.
Schawlow worked on the project that led to the construction of the first
working maser in 1953 (for which Townes received a share of the 1964
Nobel Prize for Physics). Schawlow was a research physicist at Bell
Telephone Laboratories from 1951 to 1961. In 1958 he and Townes published
a paper in which they outlined the working principles of the laser,
though the first such working device was built by another American physicist,
Theodore Maiman, in 1960. In 1961 Schawlow became a professor at Stanford
University. He became a world authority on laser spectroscopy, and he
and Bloembergen earned their share of the 1981 Nobel Prize by using
lasers to study the interactions of electromagnetic radiation with matter.
|