Willis Eugene Lamb
| Willis Lamb | |
|---|---|
Lamb in 1955
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| Born | Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. July 12, 1913 Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Died | May 15, 2008 (aged 94) Tucson, Arizona, U.S. |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions |
University of Arizona University of Oxford Yale Columbia Stanford |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | J. Robert Oppenheimer |
| Doctoral students |
Bernard Feld (1945) Norman Kroll (1948) Theodore Maiman (1955) Marlan Scully (1966) Balázs László Győrffy (1966) Frederick Hopf Murray Sargent III Stanley L. Kaufman David Mader Ralph Jacobs |
| Known for |
Lamb shift Laser Theory Quantum Optics |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Physics (1955) |
Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (July 12, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum." The Nobel Committee that year awarded half the prize to Lamb and the other half to Polykarp Kusch, who won "for his precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron." Lamb was able to determine precisely a surprising shift in electron energies in a hydrogen atom (see Lamb shift). Lamb was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.
Lamb was born in Los Angeles, California, United States and attended Los Angeles High School. First admitted in 1930, he received a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Mössbauer. He worked on nuclear theory, laser physics, and verifying quantum mechanics.
Lamb was the Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1962, and also taught at Yale, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Arizona. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.
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