Nicolaas Bloembergen
| Nicolaas Bloembergen | |
|---|---|
Bloembergen in 1981
|
|
| Born |
March 11, 1920 Dordrecht, Netherlands |
| Residence | United States |
| Citizenship |
Netherlands United States |
| Fields | Applied physics |
| Institutions | University of Arizona |
| Alma mater |
Leiden University University of Utrecht |
| Doctoral advisor | Cornelis Jacobus Gorter |
| Other academic advisors | Edward Purcell |
| Doctoral students |
Peter Pershan Michael Downer Yuen-Ron Shen Eli Yablonovitch |
| Known for | Laser spectroscopy |
| Notable awards |
Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1958) Stuart Ballantine Medal (1961) National Medal of Science (1974) Lorentz Medal (1978) Nobel Prize in Physics (1981) IEEE Medal of Honor (1983) Dirac Medal (1983) |
Nicolaas Bloembergen (born March 11, 1920) is a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate.
Bloembergen was born in Dordrecht on March 11, 1920, where his father was a chemical engineer and executive. He had five siblings, with his brother Auke later becoming a legal scholar. In 1938, Bloembergen entered the University of Utrecht to study physics. However, during World War II, the German authorities closed the University and Bloembergen spent two years in hiding.
Bloembergen left the war-ravaged Netherlands in 1945 to pursue graduate studies at Harvard University under Professor Edward Mills Purcell. Six weeks before his arrival, Purcell and his graduate students Torrey and Pound discovered nuclear magnetic resonance. Bloembergen was hired to develop the first NMR machine. At Harvard he attended lectures by Schwinger, Van Vleck, and Kemble.
While studying at Harvard, Bloembergen also worked part-time as a graduate research assistant for Purcell at the MIT Radiation Laboratory.
Bloembergen returned to the Netherlands in 1947, and submitted his thesis Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation at the University of Leiden. This was because he had completed all the preliminary examinations in the Netherlands, and Cor Gorter of Leiden offered him a postdoctoral appointment there. He received his Ph.D. degree from Leiden in 1948, and then was a postdoc at Leiden for about a year.
...
Wikipedia