Townes He entered Furman University in his hometown at age 16 and became interested in physics. He received two degrees from Furman – a Bachelor of Arts in Modern Languages and a Bachelor of Science in Physics. He then went to Duke University, where he received a master’s degree in physics in 1937. He wrote his master’s thesis on van der Graaf generators and continued his studies in French, Italian, and Russian. He completed his education at the California Institute of Technology, where he investigated the spin of the carbon-13 nucleus and was awarded a Ph.D. in physics in 1939.
Townes he spent the next eight years as a researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories; While living in New York City, he also took classes at the Julliard School of Music and enjoyed the city’s cultural attractions. During World War II he did extensive work on radar bombing and systems design, as well as some of the early work in radio astronomy. After the war he made critical contributions to the development of high-resolution spectroscopy of gases in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. He continued this work when he joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1948.
The advent of radar in World War II led to the widespread use of electronic devices in scientific research. The area that most interested Townes was the use of microwaves (low frequency radiation) to investigate the structure of matter. To effectively carry out this type of research, oscillators were needed that could produce very short wavelength radiation. But by the late 1940s it had become clear that it would never be possible to build an ordinary oscillator capable of generating radiation of wavelength less than one millimeter.
It was in 1951 when Townes He had the innovative idea for his maser and outlined the plans on the back of an envelope while he waited for a restaurant to open. Townes reasoned that in order to amplify very short wavelength radiation, action on a molecular scale would be required. He conceived of a way in which a set of molecules would be able, through stimulated emission, to produce a self-excited oscillator that could amplify the signals. The molecules had to be in what is known as an excited state, that is, they had to contain a large amount of energy; they also had to be unstable. The electromagnetic waves would stimulate the molecules by releasing their extra energy at the same frequency and phase as the stimulating electromagnetic energy. If the correct number of molecules were present, this energy would be converted to electromagnetic energy very quickly, and coherent (i.e., in-phase) amplification would be possible.
Townes called this device a “maser“- an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation – and built the first in 1954 with HJ Zeiger and James P. Gordon at Columbia University. This maser ran on ammonia gas. With the collaboration of AL Schawlow, Townes described the conditions necessary for the operation of masers in different wavelength regions, namely the infrared, visible and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.Such devices were known as optical masers, and the first was built in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman.
The development of the maser of Townes proved to be critical in modern experimental research. Maser amplifiers have a very high signal-to-noise ratio. They come very close to the amplification of a single photon of radiation, since they approach the maximum precision allowed by the uncertainty principle in measuring the phase and energy of a given particle. Masers are therefore extremely useful in experiments performed on a quantum level. In addition, they are useful in long-range radar and microwave communications and in the reception and detection of weaker signals in radio astronomy.
In 1964 Townes was awarded the Nobel Prize for his crucial work in quantum electronics that led him to develop the maser. The award was shared with two Russian scientists, NG Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov, who had independently developed something similar to the maser.
While working at the maser in 1957, Townes and physicist Arthur L. Schawlow were looking for ways to produce extremely concentrated beams of light. At the time, lasers were thought to have purely scientific possible uses. Townes and Schawlow were granted patents in 1960 for laser technology, but they never personally benefited. Townes was a consultant for Bell Telephone Laboratories and Schawlow an employee of the same company.
From 1950 to 1952 he was director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory. From 1952 to 1955 he was also chair of the physics department at Columbia. In 1959 he was fired to work as vice president and director of research at the Institute for Defense Analysis in Washington, DC, where he dealt primarily with matters related to national defense and foreign policy. In 1961 he became a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He left MIT in 1966 to become a University Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley. He retired from that institution in 1986, but continued working until a year before his death.
Charles Hard Townes He passed away on January 27, 2015, at the age of 99.