Nicolaas Bloembergen was a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy.
15 Facts About Nicolaas Bloembergen
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Nicolaas Bloembergen was born in Dordrecht on March 11,1920, where his father was a chemical engineer and executive.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen had five siblings, with his brother Auke later becoming a legal scholar.
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In 1938, Nicolaas Bloembergen entered the University of Utrecht to study physics.
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However, during World War II, the German authorities closed the university and Nicolaas Bloembergen spent two years in hiding.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen left the war-ravaged Netherlands in 1945 to pursue graduate studies at Harvard University under Professor Edward Mills Purcell.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen returned to the Netherlands in 1947, and submitted his thesis Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation at the University of Leiden.
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From 1964 to 1965, Nicolaas Bloembergen was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen had modified the maser of Charles Townes, and in 1956, Nicolaas Bloembergen developed a crystal maser, which was more powerful than the standard gaseous version.
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From this theoretical work, Nicolaas 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.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen received the Bijvoet Medal of the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research of Utrecht University in 2001.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Arthur Schawlow, along with Kai Siegbahn.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen met Huberta Deliana Brink in 1948 while on vacation with his university's Physics Club.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen was able to travel with Bloembergen to the United States in 1949 on a student hospitality exchange program; he proposed to her when they arrived in the States, and were married by 1950 on return to Amsterdam.
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Nicolaas Bloembergen died on September 5,2017, at an assisted living facility in his hometown Tucson, Arizona of cardiorespiratory failure, at the age of 97.