Who is charles townes

Lasers are at the core of the CD and DVD players in the home, the bar-code scanner in the supermarket, range-finders and altimeters used by the military, speed detectors used by state troopers and a host of other commercial products.

In medicine, their uses include laser scalpels, smoothing the skin, removing tattoos, reattaching retinas and shaping the cornea to eliminate the need for glasses. In astronomy, they are used for measuring distances and examining cosmological phenomena in deep space. In industry and government, they are used for high-speed transmission of data over fiber-optic cables. Chemist Ahmed H. Physicist Theodor W.

Normal white light, like that emitted by the sun or a lightbulb, is a jumbled mixture of wavelengths, or colors — all out of step with one another, like a mass of people walking across a bridge. A laser, in contrast, emits a narrow beam of light of one defined wavelength in lockstep, like soldiers marching across that same bridge. And while the footsteps of the crowd have little effect on the bridge, the combined footfalls of the soldiers have much greater impact, causing the bridge to shake and tremble.

Similarly, the coherent light from a laser carries much more power than simple white light, allowing it to burn through flesh or even steel. The idea of stimulated emission of radiation at the heart of the laser was put forth by Albert Einstein in He reasoned that the absorption of radiation of a particular wavelength by atoms will stimulate them to emit radiation of the same wavelength.

Physicists, however, viewed this primarily as a theoretical concept because atoms typically absorb more light than they emit, leading to a loss of energy rather than amplification. He had been working for years to decrease the wavelength of microwaves to enhance their use in communications and headed a Navy committee charged with solving the problem.

Microwaves can have wavelengths as long as a few feet, but Townes was working with wavelengths of about half an inch and seeking still shorter ones, which would have more uses. But electronic devices that might generate such short wavelengths were too small to produce sufficient power for any foreseeable application.

On the morning of the last day of a futile meeting in Washington, D. He reasoned that developing electronic amplifiers would not work and started to imagine using molecules, which produce radiation when they vibrate at high speeds. The problem was that a lot of heat is normally required to make the molecules vibrate, and that heat destroys the molecules. He speculated that a flash of bright light could be used to create a population of excited ammonia molecules and that confining them in an appropriate cavity would limit the wavelengths that they could then emit.

Nobel laureate and co-inventor of the laser, Charles Townes of the University of California Berkeley, passed away on Tuesday, January 27, at the age of Photo: OSTI. He served on numerous high-level government advisory panels and developed ways to use lasers in astronomy. His overwhelming dedication to science and personal commitment to remaining active in research was inspirational to all of us.

Charles Hard Townes originally hailed from Greenville, South Carolina, and graduated summa cum laude from Furman University in at the age of 19 with degrees in both physics and modern languages.

Townes shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the maser and the description of the laser, which was first built in Courtesy the American Physical Society. Then a professor at Columbia University and a consultant for Bell Telephone Laboratories, Townes had transitioned from working on radar during World War II to using shorter wavelengths of light to study the energy states of molecules, a field called spectroscopy.

The problem bedeviling him was how to create an intense beam of microwave energy to use as a probe. Albert Einstein proposed in that the right wavelength of light can stimulate an excited atom to emit light of the same wavelength, essentially amplifying it, but Townes was stymied by how to corral a gas of excited atoms without them flying apart.

His revelatory solution allowed him to separate excited from non-excited molecules and store them in a resonant cavity, so that when a microwave traveled through the gas, the molecules were stimulated to emit microwaves in step with one another: a coherent burst. He and his students built such a device using ammonia gas in and dubbed it a maser, for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Prokhorov and Nicolai G. Basov, who independently came up with the idea for a maser.

To date, more than a dozen Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work done with lasers. Lasers are incorporated into consumer electronics and optical fibers, surveying equipment and printers, light shows and laser pointers.

Lasers are used to cut metal, slice through tissue during surgery, trap atoms, and even initiate nuclear fusion. Townes himself went on to use masers for radio astronomy, and lasers for infrared astronomy and interferometry, and promoted their use in areas as diverse as precision timekeeping — the atomic clock — and extraterrestrial communication.

With the help of lasers, he and colleagues detected the first complex molecules in interstellar space and first measured the mass of the black hole in the center of our galaxy. Townes has served as provost and professor of physics at MIT, director of the Enrico Fermi International School of Physics, and university professor of physics at the University of California.

He holds honorary degrees from more than 25 institutions including Furman and is the recipient of close to honors and awards. In , he was awarded the Templeton Prize for his efforts to build bridges between science and religion. Townes Lecture Series. Academics Charles H. About Charles Townes.