Nikolay Basov

Nikolay Basov married Ksenia Tikhonovna Basova in 1950. She was a physicist too and worked at the Department of General Physics of the Moscow Institute of Physical Engineers. The couple was blessed with two sons, Gennady and Dmitry.

He breathed his last on July 1, 2001, in Moscow Russia, at the age of 78.

Nikolay Basov was born on December 14, 1922, in the small town of Usman near Voronezh, to Gennady Fedorovich Basov and Zinaida Andreevna Molchanova. His father was a professor at the Voronezh Forest Institute and dedicated his life investigating the influence of forest belts on underground waters and on surface drainage.

Young Basov trained himself academically at Voronezh. In 1941, he completed secondary school after which he was called for military service at Kuibyshev Military Medical Academy.

In 1943, he left the academy as military doctor’s assistant and went to serve in the Red Army, participating in the Second World War with the 1st Ukrainian Front.

Basov was relieved off his military duties in December 1945. Later, he enrolled himself at the Moscow Institute of Physical Engineers, studying theoretical and experimental physics. He graduated from the same in 1950

From 1950 to 1953 he served as a postgraduate student of the Moscow Institute of Physical Engineers. Simultaneously, he held professorship at the Institute in the department of solid-state physics. Alongside this, he worked on his thesis at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R., under the guidance of Professor M.A. Leontovich and Professor A.M. Prochorov. His association with Prokhorov lasted long.

It was in 1952 that Basov began his work in the field of quantum radiophysics. Both theoretically and experimentally, Basov made several attempts to design and build oscillators.

In 1953, he defended his dissertation for the Candidate of Sciences degree, which is equivalent to PhD. Three years later, in 1956, he came up with a dissertation on the theme ‘A Molecular Oscillator’ for the Doctor of Sciences degree. His work summed up the theoretical and experimental works on creation of a molecular oscillator utilizing an ammonia beam.

In 1955, Basov, along with his pupils and collaborators, organized a group for the investigation of the frequency stability of molecular oscillators. Together they studied the dependence of the oscillator frequency on different parameters for a series of ammonia spectral lines.

Basov’s group researched ways for increasing frequency stability, producing slow molecules, investigating the operation of oscillators with resonators in series, realizing phase stabilization of klystron frequency, studying transition processes in molecular oscillators, and designing an oscillator utilizing a beam of deuterium ammonia.

In 1957, Basov worked on the design and construction of quantum oscillators in the optical range. Following year, together with B.M Vul and Yu.M Popov, he investigated the conditions for production of states with a negative temperature in semiconductors, and suggested utilization of a pulse breakdown for that purpose.

Basov’s most famous work came during the decade of 1950s, when he together with Aleksandr Prokhorov, published a paper describing the possibility of a molecular generator of coherent microwave radiation. The idea was based on the effect of stimulated emission of radiation by atoms. The device used for the purpose was primarily named maser. The duo with the help of masers and lasers, produced concentrated and coherent beams of microwaves and light, respectively.