Arthur Leonard Schawlow
Schawlow, Arthur Leonard (1921-1999) was an American physicist. He helped develop the laser, a device that produces a very powerful beam of light. Schawlow won the 1981 Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy, the use of laser beams to determine detailed information about molecular structure. Schawlow shared the prize with American physicist Nicolaas Bloembergen, who worked separately on laser spectroscopy development, and Swedish physicist Kai Manne Borje Siegbahn, who worked on electron spectroscopy.
Schawlow was born on May 5, 1921, in Mount Vernon, New York. His family moved to Toronto, Canada, when he was 3 years old. Schawlow won a scholarship in mathematics to the University of Toronto.
Schawlow received a B.A. degree from the University of Toronto in 1941. From 1941 to 1944, during World War II (1939-1945), he taught physics classes for military personnel at the university. He earned an M.A. degree in physics in 1942. After the war ended in 1945, Schawlow returned to his studies at the university and earned a Ph.D. degree in 1949.
From 1949 to 1951, Schawlow was a postdoctoral fellow and research associate at Columbia University in New York City. There he started working with the American physicist Charles Hard Townes on microwave spectroscopy. Microwaves are an invisible form of radiation.
In 1951, Schawlow took a job at Bell Telephone Laboratories (now part of Lucent Technologies), where he worked on superconductivity. Superconductivity is a phenomenon in which certain metals and other materials conduct electricity without resistance, usually at extremely low temperatures.
In 1954, Townes created the maser, a device that generates or amplifies microwaves. The device was called a maser because it demonstrated m icrowave a mplification by s timulated e mission of r adiation. Townes won a share of the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics for developing the maser. The two physicists together wrote the book Microwave Spectroscopy, published in 1955.
Townes and Schawlow worked together to design a device that would amplify light in the same way that the maser amplified radio waves. They proposed a way to build such a device in the article “Infrared and Optical Masers,” published in the December 1958 issue of the journal Physical Review. They then built the device, which later became known as a laser. The word laser comes from the first letters of the words that describe the key processes in the creation of laser light. These words are l ight a mplification by s timulated e mission of r adiation.
Schawlow and Townes were not the only scientists trying to build a laser, however. The first practical instrument was completed by the American physicist Theodore Maiman on May 16, 1960. Schawlow and Townes finished their laser later that year.
In 1961, Schawlow became a professor of physics at Stanford University in California. There, he worked on the development of laser spectroscopy, for which he won his Nobel Prize. Schawlow used some of the prize money to establish an organization called California Vocations, in Paradise, California, for autistic adults. Autism is a serious medical disorder characterized by a limited ability to communicate and interact with other people. Schawlow's son is autistic.
Schawlow retired from Stanford in 1991. He received many honors and awards in addition to the Nobel Prize. The Laser Institute of America named its highest award the Schawlow Medal, and Schawlow himself was its first recipient in 1982. Schawlow received the National Medal of Science in 1991. In 1996, he was elected to the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Schawlow died of congestive heart failure resulting from leukemia on April 28, 1999, at a hospital in Palo Alto, California.