Nicolaas Bloembergen
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031172
Today is the birthday of Nicolaas Bloembergen, who was born in Dordrecht, Netherlands, in 1920. He earned a degree at the University of Utrecht just weeks before the Nazis closed the university in 1943. He spent the next two years in hiding, eating tulip bulbs and reading physics books under a storm lamp. Beginning in the 1950s Bloembergen studied masers and then their optical counterpart, lasers. He developed laser spectroscopy, which uses the focused light to study the properties of matter. That technique led him to formulate nonlinear optics as a means of exploring the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation. Bloembergen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981. (Image credit: Vetter, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl)
Date in History: 11 March 1920
