Nicolaas Bloembergen

Nicolaas Bloembergen, born in 1920, Dutch-American physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Bloembergen is noted for his pioneering research in laser spectroscopy, a technique that uses energy emissions to study the properties of matter. For his work in developing laser spectroscopy, Bloembergen received the 1981 Nobel Prize in physics, which he shared with Swedish physicist Kai Manne Borje Siegbahn and American physicist Arthur Leonard Schawlow.

Bloembergen was born in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, and received his Ph.D. degree in 1948 from the Leiden University. In 1951 he joined the faculty of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he spent the remainder of his career. He became a United States citizen in 1958.

Spectroscopy is the study of the electromagnetic spectrum produced by a substance when exposed to certain kinds of energy, such as radiation. The substance absorbs or emits some of the energy, thereby producing a spectrum that can be carefully measured and analyzed. The spectrum provides information about molecular-energy levels, chemical bonds, and other features of the substance.

Bloembergen was especially interested in using lasers to excite a substance, and then studying the relative amounts of energy the substance absorbs. Lasers are intense beams of light waves. However, at very high intensities, the traditional laws of optics do not apply. Bloembergen worked out new laws of optics for these situations and used these laws to develop additional techniques for laser spectroscopy. Applications for these techniques range from the analysis of biological substances to the study of combustion in jet engines.