Nikolay Basov—Nobel Prize for Lasers and Masers

Abstract

F e a Institute, Boston, MA (D.P.S.). T he 1964 Nobel Prize for physics was shared by 3 physicists—2 Russians, Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov (1922-2001) and his teacher Aleksandr M. Prokhorov (1916-2002), and 1 American, Charles H. Townes (1915)—for basic research in the field of experimental physics. Their research led to the discovery of the laser and maser. Townes worked independently of the 2 Russian physicists. From these achievements, the new field of quantum electronics emerged. Lasers and masers have been used in radio astronomy, radar, satellite communication, medicine, and other fields. In medicine, lasers have been used in a wide range of tasks, including delicate operations in which it is necessary to burn tissue. Both lasers and masers collect energy waves, amplify them hundreds of times, and produce a beam with waves that are almost perfectly parallel with little or no interference. Basov, the son of a professor at the Voronezh Forest Institute, was born on December 14, 1922, in Usman, a village near the city of Voronezh in central Russia (about 160 miles northeast of Kharkov). After graduating from high school in 1941, Basov entered the Russian army and trained as a doctor’s assistant at the Kuibyshev Military Medical Academy. He served near the First Ukranian Front during World War II (1939-1945). After being discharged from the army in December 1945, Basov entered the Moscow Institute of Physical Engineers, from which he graduated in 1950. Two years before graduation, he became a laboratory assistant in the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. In 1952, while studying the interaction between incident electromagnetic waves and matter, Basov