Nikolai Basov | Biography

Nikolai Basov is one of the inventors of the laser and its technical predecessor, the maser. Lasers have become one of the most widely used of all twentieth-century inventions. They find diverse applications from delicate surgery to the cutting of steel, astronomical research, and popular entertainment. Working with theoretical concepts first developed by Albert Einstein four decades earlier, Basov found ways of amplifying a beam of incoming electromagnetic radiation until it becomes a discrete, intense, monochromatic and amplified version of itself, a source of high-intensity radiation. For this discovery, Basov shared the 1964 Nobel Prize for physics with his teacher Aleksandr Prokhorov and Charles Townes, an American who made the same discovery independently.

Nikolai Gennadiyevich Basov was born on December 14, 1922, in the small village of Usman, outside the city of Voronezh, Russia. His mother was the former Zinaida Andreyevna Molchanova, and his father, Gennady Fedorovich Basov, was a professor at the Voronezh Forest Institute. Basov attended local schools in Voronezh and then in 1941 was drafted into the Soviet army. He was trained as a medical assistant and served on the Western front until his discharge in December of 1945.

As a civilian, Basov entered the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (also referred to as the Moscow Institute of Physical Engineers or the Moscow Institute of Engineering Physics), where he studied theoretical and experimental physics. Five years later, he was awarded his candidate's degree, comparable to a master's degree in Western universities. While still at the Moscow Institute, he became a laboratory assistant at the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. In 1956, he was awarded his doctorate in physico-mathematical sciences. After receiving his degree, Basov remained at the Lebedev Institute, eventually becoming deputy director and director of the laboratory. In 1963, Basov also became professor of physics at his alma mater, the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute, a post he still holds. In that same year, he founded the Laboratory of Quantum Radio Physics at the Lebedev Institute and became its director. Since 1967, he has also been editor of the prestigious Soviet science magazine Priroda (Nature) and the more specialized Soviet Journal of Quantum Electronics.

During the early 1950s, a number of physicists had begun to consider the possibility of developing a device that amplifies a given electromagnetic wave, that is, a device that increases the strength of an incoming wave while preserving its original phase. Such a device had been made possible by theoretical research carried out by Albert Einstein around 1917. According to classical physics, electrons are capable of absorbing discrete amounts of energy that cause them to jump from lower energy levels to higher energy levels. When they do so, they remain in the higher energy level only instantaneously before re-emitting the absorbed energy and returning to their ground state.

Einstein re-studied this problem from the standpoint of quantum mechanics and made an intriguing discovery. He found that in the presence of specific types of radiation, an electron already present in a higher energy level could jump to a lower energy level, emitting energy as it did so. Since this change is contrary to classical laws of physics, it was designated as a "stimulated emission" of energy.

Research in the 1950s was aimed at translating this theoretical concept into a practical device. The most difficult challenge was to find a way of promoting electrons from lower to higher energy levels where they could be stimulated by an external source of radiation. That problem was solved independently and almost simultaneously by Charles H. Townes in the United States and by Basov and Prokhorov in Russia. In 1952, the two Russian scientists read a paper before the All-Union (Soviet Union) Conference on Radio Spectroscopy in which they described a "molecular generator." The "molecular generator" was identical with an amplification device that became better known as a maser (for m icrowave a mplification by s timulated e mission of r adiation).

Over the next three decades, Basov continued and expanded his research on the amplification of electromagnetic radiation. In 1955, he and Prokhorov suggested a more elegant method of promoting electrons, called the three-level technique, since electrons are maintained at three different energy levels within an atom. Basov also examined the possibility of using semiconductors in the manufacture of masers and lasers and, in 1968, was able to initiate a thermonuclear fusion reaction by means of an especially powerful laser. In addition to the Nobel Prize for physics in 1964, Basov's accomplishments have earned him a number of honors, including the Lenin Prize in 1959 and 1964, and gold medals from the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences, the Italian Physical Society, and the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Basov died in July 1, 2001, Moscow, Russia, at the age of 78.