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Nicolaas
Bloembergen (March 11, 1920 –
September 5, 2017) was a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving
principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy. During
his career, he was a professor at Harvard University and
later at the University of Arizona and
at Leiden University in 1973 (as Lorentz Professor). Bloembergen shared the
1981 Nobel Prize in Physics along
with Arthur Schawlow and Kai Siegbahn because
their work "has had a profound effect on our present knowledge of the
constitution of matter" through the use of laser spectroscopy. In
particular, Bloembergen was singled out because he "founded a new field of
science we now call non-linear optics" by mixing "two or more beams of
laser light... in order to produce laser light of a different wave length"
and thus significantly broaden the laser spectroscopy frequency band. Bloembergen
was born in Dordrecht on March 11, 1920, where
his father was a chemical engineer and executive. He had five siblings, with
his brother Auke later becoming a
legal scholar. In 1938, Bloembergen entered the University of Utrecht to
study physics. However, during World War II, the German authorities closed the university and Bloembergen
spent two years in hiding. Bloembergen left the war-ravaged Netherlands in 1945
to pursue graduate studies at Harvard University under
Professor Edward Mills Purcell. Through
Purcell, Bloembergen was part of the prolific academic lineage tree of J. J. Thomson, which includes many other Nobel Laureates,
beginning with Thomson himself (Physics Nobel, 1906) and Lord
Rayleigh (Physics Nobel, 1904), Ernest Rutherford (Chemistry Nobel 1908), Owen Richardson (Physics Nobel, 1928), and finally
Purcell (Physics, Nobel 1952). Bloembergen's other influences include John Van Vleck (Physics Nobel, 1977) and Percy Bridgman (Physics Nobel, 1946). Six
weeks before his arrival, Purcell and his graduate students Torrey and Pound
discovered nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Bloembergen was hired to develop the first NMR
machine. At Harvard he attended lectures by Schwinger, Van Vleck, and Kemble. Bloembergen's NMR systems are the predecessors of
modern-day MRI machines, which are
used to examine internal organs and tissues. Bloembergen's research on NMR led
to an interest in masers, which were introduced in 1953 and
are the predecessors of lasers. Bloembergen returned to the Netherlands in
1947, and submitted his thesis Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation at
the University of Leiden. This
was because he had completed all the preliminary examinations in the
Netherlands, and Cor Gorter of Leiden
offered him a postdoctoral appointment there. He
received his Ph.D. degree from
Leiden in 1948, and then was a postdoc at Leiden for about a year. n 1949, he
returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. In
1951, he became an associate professor; he then became Gordon McKay Professor
of Applied Physics in 1957; Rumford Professor of Physics in
1974; and Gerhard Gade University Professor in 1980. In 1990 he retired
from Harvard. In addition, Bloembergen served as a visiting
professor. From 1964 to 1965, Bloembergen was a visiting professor at the University of California,
Berkeley. In 1996–1997, he was a visiting scientist at the
College of Optical Sciences of the University of Arizona; he
became a professor at Arizona in 2001. Bloembergen was a member of the Board of
Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Honorary Editor
of the Journal of Nonlinear Optical Physics & Materials. By
1960 while at Harvard, he experimented with microwave spectroscopy. Bloembergen
had modified the maser of Charles Townes, and in 1956, Bloembergen developed a
crystal maser, which was more powerful than the standard gaseous version. With
the advent of the laser, he participated in the development of the field
of laser spectroscopy, which
allows precise observations of atomic structure using lasers. Following the
development of second-harmonic generation by Peter Franken and others in 1961, Bloembergen studied how
when one bombards matter with a focused and
high-intensity beam of photons, a new structure of matter is
revealed. This he termed the study of nonlinear optics. In reflection to his work in a Dutch
newspaper in 1990, Bloembergen said: "We took a standard textbook on
optics and for each section we asked ourselves what would happen if the
intensity was to become very high. We were almost certain that we were bound to
encounter an entirely new type of physics within that domain". From
this theoretical work, Bloembergen found ways to combine two or more laser
sources consisting of photons in the visible
light frequency range to generate a single laser source with
photons of different frequencies in the infrared and ultraviolet ranges, which extends the amount of atomic
detail that can be gathered from laser spectroscopy.