Charles Townes—Nobel Laureate for Maser-Laser Work

Abstract

The American physicist Charles Hard Townes shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with 2 Soviet physicists, Aleksandr M. Prokhorov (1916-2002) and his student Nikolay G. Basov (1922-2001), for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers on the maserlaser principle. Townes conceived the idea of the maser in 1951 and built the first device in 1953. The Soviet scientists, working independently of Townes, provided much of the theoretical work for lasers and masers. These devices have applications as widely varied as high-resolution spectroscopy, length standards, surgery, welding, radar, and communications. Townes, the fourth of 6 children of an attorney, was born on July 28, 1915, on a farm outside Greenville, SC. He attended Furman University in his hometown, receiving both the BS degree in physics and the BA degree in modern languages in 1935, graduating summa cum laude. He then enrolled in Duke University in Durham, NC, and received the MSc degree in physics in 1937. Next, he spent 2 years at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he was awarded the PhD degree in physics, in 1939, for his thesis on “The Separation of Isotopes and the Determination of the Spin of the Nucleus of Carbon 13.” After receiving his doctoral degree, Townes joined the technical staff of the Bell Telephone Company in New Jersey and worked with that group from 1939 to 1947. During World War II (1939-1945), while with Bell Laboratories, Townes worked on radar bombing systems and microwave spectroscopy and did some early work on radio astronomy. In 1948, Townes joined the faculty of Columbia University in New York City as a teacher of physics. By 1950, he was director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory, and in 1952, he became chair of the physics department of Columbia University. In 1951, he first had the idea of what would culminate in the construction of a maser ( icrowave amplification by timulated mission of radiation). The first maser device, which used ammonia gas, was built in December 1953. In 1958, Townes and a colleague outlined the principle of the optical maser, or laser. They speculated that a maser could deliver infrared or even visible light instead of microwaves. In 1960, such a device was constructed by the American physicist Theodore H. Maiman (1927-2007), who used a pink ruby rod that emitted intermittent bursts of red light. The device was called “laser” for light amplified by timulated mission of radiation. Lasers were soon used in medicine (certain eye operations), chemical analysis (vaporized small bits of substances for spectroscopic analysis), communications, metal working, instrumentation and measurement, and art and by the military. From 1959 to 1961, while on a leave of absence from Columbia University, Townes served as vice president and director of research at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, DC, where he was concerned with problems of national defense and foreign policy. In 1961, Townes officially left Columbia University and joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where he was appointed provost and professor of physics. He directed research in nonlinear optics until 1967. In 1967, Townes was appointed professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He initiated a program in radio and infrared astronomy, which led to the discovery of complex molecules (ammonia and water) in the interstellar medium. In 1986, Townes was made professor emeritus. Townes was honored on stamps issued by St Vincent in 1991 (Scott No. 1563d) and by Madagascar in 1993.