STOCKHOLM, Oct 4: Two Americans and a German won the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for optical research giving extremely accurate measurements that could one day be used in deep space travel or three-dimensional holographic television.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Roy Glauber and John Hall of the United States and Germany’s Theodor Haensch for studying light and harnessing lasers to create a ‘measuring stick’ to gauge frequencies with extreme precision.
Such precision will one day be needed for “navigation on long space journeys and for space-based telescope arrays,” the Academy said, while Haensch, the youngest of the winners at 63, said it could even lead to “3D holographic television.”
Talking from Munich, Haensch said he was “overwhelmed, happy and speechless” but the party would have to wait: “I have no time to celebrate right at the moment. People are waiting with champagne but I have to go to the airport to go to San Francisco.”
CANDLES TO LASERS: “We get most of our knowledge of the world around us through light,” said the Academy, calling optics “the physicists’ tool for dealing with light phenomena.”
The winning trio’s research answered such questions as how candle light differs from laser beams in a CD player and how light can measure time more accurately than an atomic clock.
“All three of them deserve the prize,” said Peter Rodgers, editor of Physics World magazine. “The general area of quantum optics and lasers is an area in which there has been a lot of progress in recent years. This prize reflects well on progress in that area.”
Harvard University’s Glauber, 80, said he was woken at home in Massachusetts by a call from an Academy official but he first thought it was a joke. “I could scarcely believe him,” he told a news conference at Harvard.
“I’m not sure that it was made more credible by my hearing then the voices of two Swedish scientists I’m very well acquainted with, which perhaps at least raised the possibility that it was a joke.”
Glauber, who took part in the Manhattan Project in World War Two which developed the atomic bomb, wins half of the prize money, though he expressed surprise that there was a cash award when asked how he would spend it. “Nobody mentioned money.”
He laid the groundwork for the Nobel-winning work by establishing the basis for quantum optics in 1963, providing a theoretical description of the behaviour of light particles.
“He could explain the fundamental differences between hot sources of light such as light bulbs, with a mixture of frequencies and phases, and lasers which give a specific frequency and phase,” the academy said.
Decades later, Hall and Haensch, from the University of Colorado and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University respectively, worked on determining the colour of the light in atoms and molecules with extreme precision.
Haensch used even-spaced laser pulses “like the teeth of a comb or the marks on a ruler” to determine the value of frequencies and Hall refined this technique.—Reuters
