Bloembergen shared the 1981Nobel Prize in Physics along withArthur Schawlow andKai Siegbahn because their work "has had a profound effect on our present knowledge of the constitution of matter" through the use oflaser spectroscopy. In particular, Bloembergen was singled out because he "founded a new field of science we now callnon-linear optics" by mixing "two or more beams of laser light... in order to produce laser light of a different wave length" and thus significantly broaden the laser spectroscopy frequency band.[2]
Bloembergen was born inDordrecht on March 11, 1920, where his father was a chemical engineer and executive.[2] He had five siblings, with his brotherAuke later becoming a legal scholar.[3] In 1938, Bloembergen entered theUniversity of Utrecht to study physics. However, duringWorld War II, theGerman authorities closed the university and Bloembergen spent two years in hiding.[2]
Bloembergen left the war-ravaged Netherlands in 1945 to pursue graduate studies atHarvard University under ProfessorEdward Mills Purcell.[4] Through Purcell, Bloembergen was part of the prolific academic lineage tree ofJ. J. Thomson, which includes many other Nobel Laureates, beginning with Thomson himself (Physics Nobel, 1906) andLord Rayleigh (Physics Nobel, 1904),Ernest Rutherford (Chemistry Nobel 1908),Owen Richardson (Physics Nobel, 1928), and finally Purcell (Physics, Nobel 1952).[5] Bloembergen's other influences includeJohn Van Vleck (Physics Nobel, 1977) andPercy Bridgman (Physics Nobel, 1946).[6]
Six weeks before his arrival, Purcell and his graduate students Torrey and Pound discoverednuclear magnetic resonance (NMR).[4] Bloembergen was hired to develop the first NMR machine. At Harvard he attended lectures bySchwinger,Van Vleck, andKemble.[2] Bloembergen's NMR systems are the predecessors of modern-dayMRI machines, which are used to examine internal organs and tissues.[7] Bloembergen's research on NMR led to an interest inmasers, which were introduced in 1953 and are the predecessors of lasers.[8]
Bloembergen returned to the Netherlands in 1947, and submitted his thesisNuclear Magnetic Relaxation at theUniversity of Leiden.[9] This was because he had completed all the preliminary examinations in the Netherlands, andCor Gorter of Leiden offered him apostdoctoral appointment there.[9] He received hisPh.D. degree from Leiden in 1948, and then was a postdoc at Leiden for about a year.[2]
In 1949, he returned to Harvard as a junior fellow of theSociety of Fellows.[5] In 1951, he became an associate professor; he then became Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics in 1957;Rumford Professor of Physics in 1974; and Gerhard Gade University Professor in 1980.[10] In 1990 he retired from Harvard.[10]
In addition, Bloembergen served as a visiting professor. From 1964 to 1965, Bloembergen was a visiting professor at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.[2] In 1996–1997, he was a visiting scientist at the college of optical sciences of theUniversity of Arizona; he became a professor at Arizona in 2001.[11]
By 1960 while at Harvard, he experimented withmicrowave spectroscopy.[8] Bloembergen had modified themaser ofCharles Townes,[13] and in 1956, Bloembergen developed a crystal maser, which was more powerful than the standard gaseous version.[9]
With the advent of the laser, he participated in the development of the field oflaser spectroscopy, which allows precise observations of atomic structure using lasers. Following the development ofsecond-harmonic generation byPeter Franken and others in 1961, Bloembergen studied how a new structure of matter is revealed, when one bombardsmatter with a focused and high-intensity beam ofphotons. This he termed the study ofnonlinear optics. In reflection to his work in a Dutch newspaper in 1990, Bloembergen said: "We took a standard textbook on optics and for each section we asked ourselves what would happen if the intensity was to become very high. We were almost certain that we were bound to encounter an entirely new type of physics within that domain".[7]
From this theoretical work, Bloembergen found ways to combine two or more laser sources consisting of photons in thevisible light frequency range to generate a single laser source with photons of different frequencies in theinfrared andultraviolet ranges, which extends the amount of atomic detail that can be gathered from laser spectroscopy.[8]
Bloembergen met Huberta Deliana Brink (Deli) in 1948 while on vacation with his university's Physics Club. She was able to travel with him to the United States in 1949 on a student hospitality exchange program; he proposed to her when they arrived in the States, and were married by 1950 on return to Amsterdam.[14] They were bothnaturalized as citizens of theUnited States in 1958.[10] They had three children.[14]
Bloembergen died on September 5, 2017, at an assisted living facility in his hometownTucson, Arizona, of cardiorespiratory failure, at the age of 97.[15][16][17]
On March 11, 2020, the day of Bloembergen's 100th birthday, a team of researchers at theUniversity of New South Wales published an article inNature, demonstrating for the first time the successful coherent control of the nucleus of a single atom using only electric fields, an idea first proposed by Bloembergen back in 1961.[37][38][39][40]
.png)
