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In retrospect

Nobel 1964: masers and lasers

Nature Reviews Physics volume 6, page 580 (2024)Cite this article

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In 1964, one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Charles Townes and the other half was awarded jointly to Nicolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov for their work on masers and lasers: devices that produce high intensity, coherent, monochromatic and collimated electromagnetic waves at microwave and optical frequencies and have applications ranging from telecommunications to astrophysics.

In 1951 Townes was working on microwave spectroscopy at the University of Columbia and exploring ways to create shorter wavelengths to probe molecular structures. The US Navy were also interested in producing short wavelengths and asked Townes to form a committee to explore the problem. On the morning of the last meeting of the committee, Townes, worried about the lack of progress, went to a park to reflect on the problem. Sitting on a bench, he had the idea to use atoms and molecules as natural oscillators to produce and amplify radiation. For this approach to work he needed to obtain a sample with more atoms or molecules in the excited state than in the ground state (known as population inversion).

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References

Original articles

  • Gordon, J. P., Zeiger, H. J. & Townes, C. H. Molecular microwave oscillator and new hyperfine structure in the microwave spectrum of NH3. Phys. Rev. 95, 282–284 (1954)

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  • Schawlow, A. L. & Townes, C. H. Infrared and optical masers. Phys. Rev. 112, 1940–1949 (1958)

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  • Basov, N. G. & Prokhorov, A. M. Use of molecular beams for the radio-spectroscopic study of the rotational spectra of molecules. Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 27, 431–438 (1954)

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  1. Nature Reviews Physics https://www.nature.com/natrevphys/

    Hannah Hatcher

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  1. Hannah Hatcher
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Correspondence to Hannah Hatcher.

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Hatcher, H. Nobel 1964: masers and lasers. Nat Rev Phys 6, 580 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00767-4

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