Aleksandr Prokhorov

In 1941, Prokhorov married geographer Galina Shelepina. The couple as blessed with a son, Kiril, in 1945. Kiril followed the footstapes of his father and has become a physicist in the field of optics. Currently, he leads a laser-related laboratory at the A. M. Prokhorov General Physics Institute.

Prokhorov breathed his last on January 8, 2002 in Moscow, Russia.

The Russian Academy of Sciences, where Prokhorov served as an honorary director, was reamed A. M. Prokhorov General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, following his death.

Aleksandr Prokhorov was born on July 11, 1916 in Atherton, Queensland, Australia to revolutionary Russian parents who had emigrated from Russia and were serving a period of exile in Australia.

Following the Great October Revolution, Prokhorov and his family shifted back to Russia where they originally belonged. In Russia, Prokhorov enrolled at the Leningrad State University to study physics. He graduated with honors from the same in 1939.

Following his graduation, Aleksandr Prokhorov moved to Moscow where he started work in the oscillation laboratory at the Lebedev Physical Institute, under academician ND Papaleksi. At Lebedev Institute, Prokhorov studied the propagation of radio waves in ionosphere.

During the early 1940s, with the onset of World War II, he enrolled himself in the Red Army. He fought in the infantry. Three medals and two major wounds later, he returned to the oscillation laboratory at the Lebedev Institute in 1944 to continue with his study and research. He investigated nonlinear oscillations under Professor SM Rytov.

In 1946, he defended his PhD thesis on ‘Theory of Stabilization of Frequency of a Tube Oscillator in the Theory of a Small Parameter’. The following year, he started working on coherent radiation emitted by electrons orbiting in a cyclic particle accelerator called synchrotron. He demonstrated that the emission is mostly concentrated in the microwave spectral range.

His study of the coherent radiation of electrons in the synchrotron in the region of centimetre waves formed the basis of his 1951 PhD thesis ‘Coherent Radiation of Electrons in Synchotron Accelerator’. Meanwhile, by 1950, Prokhorov was made assistant chief of the oscillation laboratory. Nikolay Basov was one of his students.

As an assistant chief, he formed a group of students and started working on radiospectroscopy of molecular rotations and vibrations. He later concentrated his study on quantum electronics. The group based much of their theoretical and practical study on a special class of molecules which had three non-degenerated moments of inertia.

The heart of Prokhorov’s research work came during the early 1950s when he along with his collaborators investigated molecular structures by the methods of microwave spectroscopy. Together with Basov, he began experimenting with beam of molecules that were moving at a uniform velocity with an aim to improve the resolution of their microwave measurements. The duo found out that they could isolate molecules that were in an excited state in a separate beam, leading to a breakthrough.

They also discovered that if the molecular beam passed through a suitable microwave resonator, the emission would build up on its own, or oscillate, ultimately generating microwaves aligned in phase and at the same wavelength. Their pioneering work on lasers and maser eventually earned them a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964.