Glauber, Roy Jay

Glauber, Roy Jay, 1925–2018, American physicist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Harvard, 1949. From 1952 he was on the faculty at Harvard, where he became a professor in 1956. Glauber was the co-recipient, with John Hall and Theodor Hänsch, of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that advanced optics technology. In the 1960s, Glauber established the field of quantum optics and advanced Einstein's observation that light can be considered both as waves and as a stream of particles. His work helped to explain the fundamental differences between diffuse sources of light such as light bulbs, which are characterized by a mixture of frequencies that are not in phase, and the intense light of lasers, characterized by a single frequency in phase. Glauber's findings laid the foundation for developments in a range of fields from quantum cryptography and quantum computing to broadband optical transmission.

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