Charles Hard Townes

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Charles H. Townes, 2007 (right) with Roderic Pettigrew

Charles Hard Townes (born July 28, 1915 in Greenville , South Carolina , † January 27, 2015 in Oakland , California ) was an American physicist and Nobel Prize winner .

Life

Charles H. Townes was on 28 July 1915 as the son of the lawyer Henry Keith Townes and his wife Ellen (Hard) Townes in Greenville ( South Carolina born). He was educated in public schools in Greenville and began studying at Furman University in Greenville, which he graduated in 1935 with a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a Bachelor of Arts in Modern Languages ​​"summa cum laude". After receiving a master’s degree in physics from Duke University in 1936 , he received his doctorate in 1939 from the California Institute of Technology on isotope separation and nuclear spin . From 1939 to 1947 he was at Bell Laboratories , where he worked on the use of radar in bombers during World War II , for which purpose he developed radar systems with ever shorter wavelengths. In 1948 he became an associate professor and in 1950 professor of physics at Columbia University . 1950 to 1952 he was executive director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory and 1952 to 1955 chairman of the physics faculty. From 1959 to 1961 he was Vice President and Director of Research at the Institute for Defense Analyzes in Washington, DC , a non-profit organization operated by eleven universities that advised the US government. He was appointed Provost and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 , but resigned as Provost in 1966 in order to be able to devote himself more to research. In 1967 he became a professor at the University of California, in particular at the University of California, Berkeley , and President of the American Physical Society . Since 1986 he was Professor Emeritus.

Townes was temporarily vice-chairman of the Science Advisory Committee of the US President and in various other government committees (including the scientific advisory body for the moon landing and for MX missiles). He was also on the boards of General Motors and Perkin Elmer .

Townes married Frances H. Brown in 1941 and has four daughters, Linda Rosenwein , Ellen Anderson , Carla Kessler and Holly Townes . He is the brother-in-law of Arthur L. Schawlow , who married his youngest sister Aurelia in 1951 . He died on January 27, 2015 in a hospital in Oakland, California at the age of 99.

plant

While at Bell Laboratories during World War II , Townes designed radar bomb systems and received a number of patents covering related technology. After the war he concentrated on the application of microwave technology from radar research in spectroscopy . Immediately before Maiman's introduction of the first laser, Townes organized an international conference at the Shawanga Lodge hotel in the Catskills in September 1959, which is considered to be the first conference on quantum electronics (i.e. the future field of the laser). The presentations of the 160 participants mostly revolved around Maser, only two discussed the possibility of transmission in the optical field (Schawlow, Ali Javan ), but a lot was said about it in the discussions.

At Columbia University he continued his research on microwave physics and researched the interaction of microwaves with molecules and the use of microwave spectra to analyze the structure of molecules, atoms and atomic nuclei. In 1952, he developed the idea for a maser , which culminated in 1954 in a working apparatus for amplification and generation of electromagnetic waves by stimulated emission - the working group coined the term maser , an acronym for m icrowave a mplification by s timulated e mission of r adiation . In 1958, together with his brother-in-law Arthur L. Schawlow, he was able to show theoretically that the principle of operation of the measles can also be applied to optical and infrared wavelengths.

Further research by Townes lay in the areas of nonlinear optics , radio and infrared astronomy . He and his colleagues were the first to succeed in detecting complex molecules in interstellar matter and (in the 1980s with Reinhard Genzel, who worked there as a post-doc at Townes ) , measuring the mass of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way (they came back then on 4 million solar masses) by tracking the movement of interstellar gas clouds near the galactic center in the infrared.

Townes was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 together with Nikolai Gennadijewitsch Bassow and Alexander Michailowitsch Prokhorov "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics that led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser - laser principle" .

Awards

The Charles Hard Townes Award of the Optical Society of America is named in his honor.

Fonts

  • Making waves . AIP Press, 1995.
  • How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist . Oxford University Press, 2000.
  • with AL Schawlow: Microwave Spectroscopy . McGraw-Hill, 1955.
  • with AL Schawlow: Infrared and Optical Masers . In: Physical Review . Volume 112, 1958, p. 1940
  • A life in physics , Oral History Interview by Suzanne Riess, University of California 1994 (preface Arthur Schawlow)

literature

  • Mario Bertolotti: History of the Laser . Taylor and Francis, 2004.
  • Robert Boyd : Charles H. Townes (1915-2015). Obituary in: Science . Volume 519, No. 7543, 2015, p. 292, doi: 10.1038 / 519292a
  • Joan Lisa Bromberg: The Laser in America, 1950-1970 . MIT Press, 1991.
  • Raymond Y. Chiao: Amazing Light: A Volume Dedicated to Charles Hard Townes on his 80th Birthday . Springer, 1996.
  • Jeff Hecht: Beam: The Race to Make the Laser . Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Jeff Hecht: Laser Pioneers . Academic Press, 1991.
  • Nick Taylor: Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War . Citadel, 2003.
  • Frances Townes: Misadventures of a Scientist's Wife . Regent Press, 2007.

Web links

Commons : Charles Townes  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nobel laureate: Laser inventor Charles Townes died at 99. Obituary on Spiegel Online from January 30, 2015 (accessed January 30, 2015).
  2. ^ John Conway, The Catskills Conference that changed the world , New York History Blog, Sept. 17, 2014
  3. ^ Member History: Charles H. Townes. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 13, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Townes, Charles Hard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Townes, Charles H.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Greenville , South Carolina , USA
DATE OF DEATH January 27, 2015
Place of death Oakland , California , USA