Roy Glauber, Nobel laureate and Harvard physics professor, dies at 93

Friday, January 25, 2019 - 16:20 in Physics & Chemistry

Roy J. Glauber ’46, the pioneering theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 2005 and was one of the last living scientists to have been present for the dawn of the atomic age, died on Dec. 26, 2018. He was 93. The research that set Glauber on the path to a Nobel began with his interest in a groundbreaking 1956 experiment that confirmed a key concept of quantum physics — that light was both a particle and a wave — and laid the groundwork for the field. His landmark 1963 paper, “The Quantum Theory of Optical Coherence,” used quantum mechanical tools to transform science’s understanding of light, which previously had only been studied using classical techniques. “We really did not have a complete understanding of the quantum properties of light, and what Roy’s work laid out was a framework for thinking about that,” said Mikhail Lukin, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor...

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