- Person
- Arthur Schawlow
- Lived
- 1921–1999
- Field
- Physics, lasers
- From
- American
The story
Arthur Schawlow was born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1921; his father was a Jewish immigrant from Riga and his mother a Canadian Protestant, and he grew up in Toronto. In 1949 he went to Columbia University to work with Charles Townes, who soon invented the maser, a device that amplifies microwaves by stimulated emission. Schawlow married Townes’s sister Aurelia and, because Columbia’s anti-nepotism rules kept Townes from hiring him, joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1951.
In 1957 and 1958 the two men set out to discover what it would take to make an optical maser, a device that would do for visible and infrared light what the maser did for microwaves. The central problem was how to build up light of a single pure wavelength. Schawlow’s key insight was to use a long chamber with a mirror at each end, so that light bouncing back and forth along the axis would be amplified on every pass while stray light escaped. In 1958 Schawlow and Townes published their theory in the Physical Review, and Bell Labs, which had filed a patent application, was granted the patent in 1960. Neither man profited from it. Theodore Maiman built the first working laser at Hughes Research Laboratories on May 16, 1960, and Gordon Gould, who had developed laser ideas independently, first published the word “LASER” in 1959.
The laser became one of the defining technologies of modern life. Lasers send the light pulses that carry internet and telephone traffic through fibre-optic cables, read barcodes at shop checkouts, print documents and read optical discs. They are used in laser surgery and skin treatments, and excimer lasers reshape the cornea in LASIK eye surgery. Factories use them to cut and weld metal, and lidar uses them to measure distances.
Schawlow spent the rest of his career at Stanford, from 1961, where he pioneered laser spectroscopy and liked to puncture the hype about death rays; a poster on his door advertising “The Incredible Laser” carried his added note, “For credible laser see inside.” He shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen for laser spectroscopy.
Why it matters
The laser that Schawlow and Townes helped define is used every day in fibre-optic communications, checkout scanners, printers, surgery and manufacturing.
About Arthur Schawlow
Co-inventor, with Charles Townes, of the laser concept behind fibre optics, barcode scanners and eye surgery; pioneer of laser spectroscopy; and early proponent of cooling atoms with light.
More about Arthur Schawlow
Sources
- Laser Wikipedia
- Arthur Schawlow, co-inventor of the laser, dies Laser Focus World
- Arthur L. Schawlow, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Arthur Leonard Schawlow Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.