science · 27 January 2015 · 10 years ago
death
Died 27 Jan 2015 at age 99 (born 28 Jul 1915).
Charles Hard Townes was an American physicist who shared (with the Soviet physicists Aleksandr M. Prokhorov and Nikolay G. Basov) the 1964 Nobel Prize for Physics “for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle.” He had been applying microwave physics to study the interactions between microwaves and molecules, producing microwave spectra, which he thought could be used to determine the structure of molecules, atoms and nuclei. Instead, from this work, in 1951, he conceived the idea of the maser and pursued that goal. By early 1954, using ammonia gas as the medium, the first results of amplification and generation of electromagnetic waves by stimulated emission were obtained. They coined the word maser for this device, an acronym using the initial letters of “Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.”
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