Glauber was born in 1925 in New York City the son of Felicia (Fox) and Emanuel B. Glauber.[9] He was a member of the 1941 graduating class of theBronx High School of Science, the first graduating class from that school. He then did his undergraduate work atHarvard University.
After his sophomore year, he was recruited to work on theManhattan Project, where (at the age of 18) he was one of the youngest scientists atLos Alamos National Laboratory. His work involved calculating thecritical mass for theatom bomb. After two years at Los Alamos, he returned to Harvard, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1946 and his PhD in 1949.[10]
Roy Glauber’s early work on multiple scattering theory started in the 1950s and was continued with his students, such as Victor Franco.[14]
Specific topics of his research included: the quantum mechanical behavior of trappedwave packets; interactions of light with trapped ions; atom counting-the statistical properties of free atom beams and their measurement; algebraic methods for dealing withfermion statistics; coherence and correlations ofbosonic atoms near theBose–Einstein condensation; the theory of continuously monitored photon counting-and its reaction on quantum sources; the fundamental nature of "quantum jumps"; resonant transport of particles produced multiply in high-energy collisions; the multiple diffraction model of proton-proton and proton-antiproton scattering.[citation needed]
Glauber was awarded half the 2005 Nobel prize, along with experimentalistsJohn Hall andTheodor Hänsch, recognized for their work on precision spectroscopy.[17][18]
For many years before winning his Nobel Prize, Glauber took part in theIg Nobel Prize ceremonies, where he appeared each year as "Keeper of the Broom," sweeping the stage clean of thepaper airplanes that have traditionally been thrown during the event. He missed the 2005 event as he was being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.[19]
Glauber's father was a traveling salesman. When Glauber was six years of age, his mother gave birth to his sister, and the family settled in the New York City area. Glauber was very interested in astronomy as a child. In December 1937, along with several other children, he gave a presentation at theAmerican Museum of Natural History in New York City, about a reflecting telescope he had built on his own. The assistant to the director of theHayden Planetarium, Dorothy Bennett, was present; she was a lecturer at the planetarium. Bennett was impressed with Glauber's work and she encouraged his membership and subsequent activity in an extra-curricular group for astronomy for the next few years. Glauber said she was "an influence in my life" and "a truly extraordinary spirit". After his work at Los Alamos, he visited her at her home, as she had moved to Taos, New Mexico.[20]
A book by quantum physicistJosé Ignacio Latorre [es] and M.T. Soto-Sanfiel contains Roy J. Glauber's memoirs of the Manhattan Project and aspects of his scientific and personal life, based on a series of interviews conducted in Singapore, Spain, and the U.S. It has been published in English[25] and Spanish.[26] The same authors produced a documentary of the same name, "That's the Story: Roy J. Glauber Remembers the Making of the Atomic Bomb" featuring Glauber recounting some of his experiences within the Manhattan Project[27]
^R. J. Glauber,Quantum Theory of Optical Coherence. Selected Papers and Lectures, Wiley-VCH, Weinheim 2007. (A collection of reprints of Glauber's most important papers from 1963 to 1999, selected by the author.)
^Bauer, T. H.; Spital, R. D.; Yennie, D.R..; Pipkin, F. M. (1978). "The Hadronic Properties of the Photon in High-Energy Interactions".Reviews of Modern Physics.50 (2): 261.Bibcode:1978RvMP...50..261B.doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.50.261.
