Nobel Prize in Physics: Seeing the Light

lidden writes "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2005 has been awarded Roy J. Glauber "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence". And John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique"."

Physics behind the awards

[Cyclotron_Boy]

PhysOrg [physorg.com] has a pretty good rundown of the physics involved in the discoveries. Worth a look...

Corresponding wikipedia articles

[Anonymous Coward]

There are already three articles about those outstanding scientists in the english wikipedia at [[Roy J. Glauber]] [wikipedia.org], [[John L. Hall]] [wikipedia.org] and [[Theodor W. Hänsch]] [wikipedia.org].

The German wikipedia and the Indonesian one has also three articles. Some of them are still to be considered stubs.

I would like you to invite to translate them into other languages (oops, I forgot Esperanto, there are already articles about them) and to contribute to those articles. We need freely licensed pictures of them and more details about their CV and their work.

Thanks you very much in advance.

Re:Physics behind the awards

[Cyclotron_Boy]

Ooops- wrong link...
Try this one [physorg.com] instead.
My bad. Need more coffee.

Re:He got a nobel prize for WHAT?!?

[feranick]

Glauber didn't discover the laser, if this is what you mean. He provided the theory for quantum optics, which deals with quantum electrodynamical interactions of light and matter. Hall and Hänsch instead developed laser-based precision spectroscopy: in other words they used laser for high precision frequency measurements. Coherent optics is not just about laser, but what you can do with them.

Re:Bandwidth enhancement?

[marcus]

A fairly large part of physics and cosmology is mind blowing. That is why it is so interesting, at least to me. Forget quantum oddness, just consider some of the numbers. Try to get a real grip on things like 10^19 eV. The universe is truly, literally, awe inspiring.

With radio we already have much more sophisticated modulation methods. Most "light band" modulation today is basically an automated, binary version of Morse Code, still effectively in the Stone Age. We are currently just barely able to "tune" a light transmitter and receiver. DWDM is nowhere near the spectral density of current radio technology. We cannot do anything with light approaching phase shift modulation, spread spectrum techniques, code division muxing, hell even plain old FM in the "light band" is currently out of reach. While lasers could be compared to classic PLLs, currently they are not even close to being as useful in frequency modulation and demodulation applications.

From a Student

[ThinkComp]

I was an undergraduate student in one of Professor Glauber's courses at Harvard two years ago, and though I'm certainly no specialist on light or physics, I really enjoyed his course (The Nature of Light and Matter). It's one of the many Core Curriculum courses at Harvard, but it's taught by one of the few professors there worthy of calling himself a teacher. He has a great sense of humor. I'm glad someone who deserves some credit was able to earn it.

Germany and America share the nobel prize

[gururise]

Germany, the traditional powerhouse in physics and America shared this 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. The interesting thing is the Glauber, the american scientist, was awarded 1/2 of the prize money (approx. 1.1 Million Euro), while Hänsch, from Germany, and Hall, from America, had to share the other half.

Hall, 71, of Colorado University and Hänsch, 63, of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, share the other half of the prize "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique".

Hänsch told reporters in Stockholm via telephone that he was at his Munich office when he learned he had won the prize.

"I was speechless and very, very ecstatic," he said. "I'm now trying to get used to the idea.

"I have learned that you don't have to know everything in your field. But you have to know what has previously not been known," he added.

Re:Took their time

[Bananenrepublik]

It's also amazing how long they took to award Hänsch, and then only 1/4th of the prize - Hänsch's discovered the monochromatic, tunable dye laser (essential to almost all laser spectroscopy application, at least until the semiconductor laser became usable, and still unparalleled in the high power range), saturation and polarization spectroscopy (techniques which allow for Doppler-free spectroscopy; again, essential techniques used in almost any laboratory where lasers are pointed at atoms), laser cooling of atoms (unfortunately he applied this technique only in one direction, a Nobel prize was awarded to the first people who used essentially the same technique for trapping atoms), and finally frequency combs (a fairly new development which allows for very precise frequency measurements in the visible and UV range). Furthermore Hänsch's group was one of the first to observe Bose-Einstein condensation, is leading in precision measurements of the spectrum of the Hydrogen atom (if I'm still up-to-date, their error margins are smaller than those of the theoretical calculations, which is a great achievement), and a number of other interesting things. In 2001, at the occasion of Hänsch's 60th birthday a colloquium was held here in Munich with talks by IIRC 6 nobel laureates, who all seemed to be embarassed that out of them only Hänsch hadn't yet been awarded the prize.

OTOH I did attend a lecture he gave a few years back and I must say that he is one of the worst lecturers I ever had, he handed the lecture off to his assistant half-way through the semester. But maybe he's a better professor in his advanced courses, his group seemed to be fairly happy with him everytime I talked to somebody.

Re:Took their time

[DerekLyons]

The (original) purpose of Nobel Prize was to encourage young gifted scientists, to give them recognition necessary to get funding for research. Obviously now it's just a sort of a medal for past achievement and adds absolutely nothing to science TODAY.

Umm... No. It's always been a medal for achievement, to quote from Alfred Nobel's will;

The whole of my remaining realisable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: The capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

Re:Particles

[Physics Nobody]

Fermi also said that at a time when we were constantly discovering new mesons and baryons and QCD had not yet been developed to put it all together yet.

These days we know that mesons are baryons are not fundamental. Remembering the names of the fundamental particles really isn't that hard and it's worth your time:

Six kinds of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom
Six kinds of leptons: electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino
Force carriers: photon, W+, W-, Z0, gluon

That's it for the standard model. Most people will agree that the graviton should be added to the list of force carriers, although nobody has observed one yet. There's also the Higgs (or possibly a family of Higgs particles), which hopefully the LHC will either observe or disprove. Then you start getting into stranger possibilities like supersymmetry (which is reasonably well supported by theory) and various whack-job theories (which aren't).

Since you never see bare quarks (a subject of last year's Nobel Prize, I believe) it's worthwhile to know some of the more common baryons (for instance, protons and neutrons) and mesons (learn your pions...and maybe kaons). But trying to memorize them all is pretty pointless, as you can have a lot of different combinations of quarks (especially when you start talking about excited states). Check the Particle Data Group (http://pdg.lbl.gov/ [lbl.gov]) if you need to look up info on a particular particle.