Light is one of the most intriguing things known to man. In a way it is ‘invisible’ yet lets us see, it is insubstantial yet it has been captured and condensed and wrought into lasers, it has even been said to be the key to time travel. Roy Glauber, the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona, was awarded one of the two 2005 physics prizes “for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence”. The other prize was shared by John Hall (USA) and Theodor Hänsch (Germany) “for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy”. Just like radio waves, light is a form of electromagnetic radiation – it can be considered both as waves and as a stream of particles. Glauber’s theoretical description of the behaviour of light particles established the basis of Quantum Optics. He could explain the fundamental differences between hot sources of light such as light bulbs, with a mixture of frequencies and phases, and lasers which give a specific frequency and phase.
Roy Jay Glauber was born in New York in 1925. As a child he was a talented artist but also joined an astronomy club and had a potentially dangerous fascination with electricity. He attended Bronx High School of Science, which opened in 1938, and in 1941 graduated to Harvard University. At the age of 18 he was drafted into the Manhattan Project, calculating the critical mass for the atom bomb. He returned to Harvard, to gain his BSc in 1946 and his PhD in 1949, after which his former boss, Robert Oppenheimer, invited him to spend a postdoctoral year in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. There he met Wolfgang Pauli and later worked with him in Zürich before returning to Princeton for a further year.
After a temporary teaching post at Caltech, where he studied electron diffraction by molecules and became interested in scattering theory, he returned to Harvard in 1952 where he continued this interest. The result was a nuclear diffraction theory similar in some ways to optical diffraction theory. The late 1950s brought the development of the laser. Glauber began to work on quantum optics and in 1963 he created his prize-winning model for photodetection. Apart from the Nobel, Glauber has received many honors for his research, including the AA Michelson Medal (1985), the Max Born Award (1985) and the Dannie Heineman Prize (1996). Glauber’s research at Harvard continues in areas of quantum optics, as well as topics in
high-energy collision theory, and the statistical correlation of particles produced in high-energy reactions. In 1960 he married Cynthia Rich, but were divorced in the early 1970s. Glauber
raised their two children, Jeffrey and Valerie, as a single father. He now has several grandchildren.
This text and the picture of the Nobel Laureate were taken from the book: "NOBELS. Nobel Laureates photographed by Peter Badge" (WILEY-VCH, 2008).
Picture: © Peter Badge/ Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings at Lake Constance |
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BENEFACTORS:
(SE) Stockholm University
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