Alexander
Mikhailovich Prokhorov (born Alexander
Michael Prochoroff, Russian: Алекса́ндр Миха́йлович Про́хоров; 11 July 1916 – 8 January 2002) was
an Australian-born Soviet-Russian physicist known for his pioneering research on lasers and masers in
the Soviet Union for
which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1964 with Charles Hard Townes and Nikolay Basov. Alexander Michael Prochoroff was born on 11
July 1916 at Russell Road Peeramon, Queensland, Australia (now 322 Gadaloff Road, Butchers Creek, situated
about 30 km from Atherton), to Mikhail
Ivanovich Prokhorov and Maria Ivanovna (née Mikhailova), Russian revolutionaries who had emigrated from Russia to
escape repression by the tsarist regime. As a child he
attended Butchers Creek School. In 1923, after the October Revolution and
the Russian Civil War, the
family returned to Russia. In 1934, Prokhorov entered the Saint Petersburg State
University to study physics. He was a member of the Komsomol from 1930 to 1944. Prokhorov graduated with honors
in 1939 and moved to Moscow to work at the Lebedev Physical Institute,
in the oscillations laboratory headed by academician N. D. Papaleksi. His research there was
devoted to propagation of radio waves in the ionosphere. At the onset of World War II in the Soviet Union, in June 1941, he joined
the Red Army. During World War II, Prokhorov fought in the infantry, was
wounded twice in battles, and was awarded three medals, including the Medal For
Courage in 1946. He was demobilized in 1944 and returned
to the Lebedev Institute where, in 1946, he defended his Ph.D. thesis on "Theory of Stabilization of Frequency of a
Tube Oscillator in the Theory of a Small Parameter". In 1947, Prokhorov
started working on coherent radiation emitted by electrons orbiting in a
cyclic particle accelerator called
a synchrotron. He demonstrated that the emission is mostly
concentrated in the microwave spectral range. His results
became the basis of his habilitation on "Coherent Radiation of Electrons in
the Synchrotron Accelerator", defended in 1951. By 1950, Prokhorov was
assistant chief of the oscillation laboratory. Around that time, he formed a
group of young scientists to work on radiospectroscopy of molecular rotations
and vibrations, and later on quantum electronics. The
group focused on a special class of molecules which have three (non-degenerate)
moments of inertia. The research was conducted both on experiment and theory.
In 1954, Prokhorov became head of the laboratory. Together with Nikolay Basov he developed theoretical grounds for
creation of a molecular oscillator and constructed such an oscillator based on
ammonia. They also proposed a method for the production of population inversion
using inhomogeneous electric and magnetic fields. Their results were first
presented at a national conference in 1952, but not published until 1954–1955;
In 1955, Prokhorov started his research in the field of electron paramagnetic
resonance (EPR). He focused on relaxation times of ions of
the iron group
elements in a lattice of aluminium oxide, but also investigated other,
"non-optical", topics, such as magnetic phase transitions in DPPH. In
1957, while studying ruby, a chromium-doped variation of aluminium oxide, he came upon the
idea of using this material as an active medium of a laser. As a new type of
laser resonator, he proposed, in 1958, an "open type" cavity design,
which is widely used today. In 1963, together with A. S. Selivanenko, he
suggested a laser using two-quantum transitions. For his pioneering work on
lasers and masers, in 1964, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics shared
with Nikolay Basov and Charles Hard Townes. In
1959, Prokhorov became a professor at Moscow State University –
the most prestigious university in the Soviet Union; the same year, he was
awarded the Lenin Prize. In 1960, he
became a member of the Russian Academy of
Sciences and elected Academician in 1966. In 1967, he was
awarded his first Order of Lenin (he
received five of them during life, in 1967, 1969, 1975, 1981 and 1986). In
1968, he became vice-director of the Lebedev Institute and in 1971 took the
position of Head of Laboratory of another prestigious Soviet institution,
the Moscow
Institute of Physics and Technology. In the same year, he was
elected a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1983 he was elected a Member of the German
Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Between 1982 and 1998, Prokhorov served as
acting director of the General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, and after 1998 as honorary director. After his death in 2002, the
institute was renamed the A. M. Prokhorov General Physics Institute [Wikidata] of
the Russian Academy of Sciences. Prokhorov was a Member and one of the Honorary
Presidents of the International
Academy of Science, Munich and supported 1993 the foundation
and development of the Russian Section of International Academy of Science,
Moscow. In 1969, Prokhorov became a Hero of Socialist Labour,
the highest degree of distinction in the Soviet Union for achievements in
national economy and culture. He received the second such award in 1986. Starting
in 1969, he was the chief editor of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
He was awarded the Frederic Ives Medal,
the highest distinction of the Optical Society of America (OSA),
in 2000[10] and became an Honorary OSA Member in 2001. The
same year, he was awarded the Demidov Prize.