Arthur Leonard Schawlow

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Artur Schawlow (photo from 1981)

Arthur Leonard Schawlow [ ˈʃaʊloʊ ] (born May 5, 1921 in Mount Vernon , New York , † April 28, 1999 in Palo Alto / California ) was an American physicist and Nobel Prize winner .

Life

Arthur Leonard Schawlow was on May 5, 1921 as the son of a Latvian immigrant and a Canadian in Mount Vernon ( New York born). At the urging of his mother, the family moved to Toronto in 1924 , where he also attended public schools. After graduating from school in 1937, he was unable to take up his desired engineering degree because the family could not finance the studies for him and his sister due to the economic crisis. However, he received a scholarship to study mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto , and his sister also received a scholarship in English literature.

Because of the difficult economic situation, he aimed for a career as a teacher of mathematics and physics. However, since Canada was already at war when he graduated in 1941 , he taught military personnel at the University of Toronto until 1944 and then worked for a radar manufacturer on the development of microwave antennas. He returned to the university for a doctorate in 1945 and then received a postdoctoral fellowship from Carbide & Carbon Chemicals at Columbia University, whose physics faculty, headed by Isidor Isaac Rabi, comprised no fewer than eight future Nobel Prize winners at the time. Here he also met Charles H. Townes , who had a great influence on him and through whom he also met his future wife. He went to Bell Laboratories in 1951 and in 1961 was appointed professor of physics at Stanford University , of which he was dean from 1966 to 1970. In the early 1970s he also worked with the post-doctoral student Theodor Hänsch , for which both were named California Scientists of the Year in 1973. Schawlow was appointed JGJackson and CJWoods Professor in 1978 and retired in 1991.

Arthur Leonard Schawlow married in 1951 the youngest sister of the later Nobel Prize winner Charles H. Townes Aurelia Townes († 1991), a mezzo-soprano and choir director. He has a son, Arthur Keith , and two daughters, Helen Aurelia (professor of French at the University of Wisconsin) and Edith Ellen (psychologist). Shawlow died on April 28, 1999 in Palo Alto.

The Arthur L. Schawlow Award of the Laser Institute of America (LIA) and the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Physics of the American Physical Society (APS) are named in his honor.

plant

During his time at Bell Laboratories, Schawlow dealt mainly with superconductors and some studies on quadrupole nuclear resonance. In his spare time he worked with his brother-in-law Charles Townes on the completion of a book on microwave spectroscopy, which was published in 1955, and in 1957/58 on the development of the basics for the application of the maser principle to shorter wavelengths and thus the development of the laser . As a result, he mainly dealt with the optical properties and the spectra of solids, which he considered suitable as laser material.

Schawlow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981 together with Nicolaas Bloembergen “for their contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy ” .

Awards

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Schawlow, Arthur Leonard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 5, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Mount Vernon , New York
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 1999
Place of death Palo Alto , California