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17 Jun 2002
Russian laser pioneer and Nobel Laureate, Aleksander Prokhorov, has died aged 85.
Aleksander Prokhorov, the Russian physicist whose groundbreaking work led to the invention of the laser, died earlier this week. Not only did Prokhorov pioneer the microwave laser or maser, which laid the foundations for many lasers, he also helped to develop open resonators and directed Russia's General Physics Institute.
Born in Australia in 1916, Prokhorov moved to the Soviet Union 7 years later, following the Russian Revolution. In 1934 he joined the physics department at Russia's Leningrad State University and on graduating in 1939 moved to the PN Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, to start his research career as a postgraduate.
Interrupted by the Second World War, Prokhorov completed his research on nonlinear oscillations in 1946. His subsequent studies of the coherent radiation of electrons in a synchrotron led to his PhD thesis in 1951.
Throughout the early 1950s and while at Lebedev's Laboratory of Oscillations, Prokhorov and his collaborators used microwave spectroscopy to research molecular structures. 1955 saw a move towards electronic paramagnetic resonance (EPR) research and by 1957, Prokhorov had discovered that ruby would make a suitable lasing material.
At this time while Prokhorov and colleagues in Russia were making their first masers, Charles Townes and Arthur Shawlow were also making similar progress in the US.
In 1958, Prokhorov and collaborators proposed a new open cavity laser for the generation of infrared waves and in 1963 he suggested a laser using two-quantum transitions. A year later, with colleague Nikolai Basov and US scientist Charles Townes, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for "fundamental work in quantum electronics that led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle."
Prokhorov headed up Russia's General Physics Institute until 1998. Reports say that he will be buried alongside the Russia's greatest scientists in Moscow's Novodyevichy cemetery.
Author
Rebecca Pool is the news editor of optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine.
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