He received the Lenin Prize together with Prokhorov in 1959 for his work that paved the way for the development of the maser and laser, and the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Prokhorov and Townes in 1964 for his contributions to quantum electronics.
BASOV, Nikolay (1922 – 1 July 2001)
USSR physicist. He was one of the pioneers of quantum electronics, developing the methods that led to the construction of the maser and laser.
Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov was born on December 14, 1922 in Voronezh. In 1948, while he was still studying at the Moscow Physics Engineering Institute, he entered the Lebedev Institute in the same city as a laboratory assistant. He received his diploma two years later and his doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences in 1957. In 1958, he was appointed deputy director of the Lebedev Institute. Basov, who founded the Quantum Radiophysics Laboratory affiliated with the same institute in 1963 and was promoted to professor at the Moscow Physics Engineering Institute, served as the director of the Lebedev Institute after 1973 (1983).
Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov (14 December 1922 – 1 July 2001) was a Russian Soviet physicist and educator. For his fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics that led to the development of laser and maser, Basov shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Alexander Prokhorov and Charles Hard Townes.
He received the Lenin Prize together with Prokhorov in 1959 for his work that paved the way for the development of the maser and laser, and the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Prokhorov and Townes (American) in 1964 for his contributions to quantum electronics.
Basov was elected a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1966, as well as a member of many scientific associations in various countries, and was awarded the Lenin medal three times in 1967, 1972, and 1975.
The basic principle of the maser, whose name is derived from the first letters of the English words "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation", and laser, which is named by substituting the word "light" instead of "microwave" in the same definition, originated from an idea put forward by Einstein in 1917.
While examining the quantum foundations of matter's interaction with electromagnetic radiation, Einstein proposed that atoms release the energy they absorb from the environment in the form of radiation again through two different mechanisms. Then, by combining these two mechanisms with the "Boltzmann rule" that regulates the thermal balance of a system, he re-derived Max Planck's famous "radiation distribution" relation.