Nicolaas Bloembergen

Nicolaas Bloembergen
Bloembergen in 1981
Born	(1920-03-11)March 11, 1920 Dordrecht, Netherlands
Died	September 5, 2017(2017-09-05) (aged 97) Tucson, Arizona, U.S.
Citizenship	Netherlands United States
Alma mater	Leiden University Utrecht University
Known for	Laser spectroscopy Non-linear optics Motional narrowing Photon upconversion Atomic line filter Second-harmonic generation BPP theory
Spouse	Huberta Deliana Brink ​ ​ (m. 1950)​
Awards	Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1958) Stuart Ballantine Medal (1961) National Medal of Science (1974) Lorentz Medal (1978) Nobel Prize in Physics (1981) IEEE Medal of Honor (1983)
Scientific career
Fields	Applied physics
Institutions	University of Arizona Harvard University
Doctoral advisor	Cornelis Jacobus Gorter
Other academic advisors	Edward Purcell
Doctoral students	Peter Pershan Yuen-Ron Shen Eli Yablonovitch

Nicolaas Bloembergen (March 11, 1920 – September 5, 2017) was a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy.^[1] During his career, he was a professor at Harvard University and later at the University of Arizona and at Leiden University in 1973 (as Lorentz Professor).

Bloembergen shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Arthur Schawlow and Kai Siegbahn because their work "has had a profound effect on our present knowledge of the constitution of matter" through the use of laser spectroscopy. In particular, Bloembergen was singled out because he "founded a new field of science we now call non-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]