The inventor of the laser died

Charles Townes, a fellow Nobel laureate with two Russian scientists, invented lasers, died at the age of 99.

According to a statement from the University of California at Berkeley, American physicist Charles Townes died on January 27 on his way to the hospital. His previous health condition was unstable.

Physicist Charles Townes said in a forum in Doha, Qatar, in 2008. (Photo: Reuters)

"He is one of the most important experimental physicists in the last century , " said Reinhard Genzel, director of the Max Planck Institute of Physics. As an emeritus professor at Berkeley, Townes is a member of the physics department and the Space Science Laboratory for nearly 50 years.

Charles Townes was born on July 28, 1915 in South Carolina. In the spring of 1951, while sitting in the park, the researcher came up with the idea of ​​how to create a short beam of wavelengths. That prompted him and his colleagues to create a device called maser , microwave amplification (microwave) with stimulated emission, in 1954.

Four years later, he and his brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow, grouped the idea of ​​creating a variant of the invention, to amplify a beam of optical light, instead of microwave energy. Bell Laboratories has patented new ideas, or lasers.

In 1964, Townes received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his research with two Russian scientists, Aleksandr Prokhorov and Nicolai Basov, who gave an independent idea about maser.

Townes pioneered the use of maser and laser in astronomy. Today, his invention with colleagues has an important application in the field of scientific research, health, telecommunications .