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 Ali
Javan is the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. A recognized world leader in the field of lasers and
quantum electronics, he has won international acclaim for his invention of the
first gas laser.
Professor Javan, a native of Teheran, Iran, received the Ph.D. degree in physics
in 1954 from Columbia University in New York City under the direction of Charles
Townes. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University, he joined
the research staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey in
September, 1958. In 1961 he joined the MIT faculty, where he has continued to
teach and conduct research up to the present.
Professor Javan conceived of the gas laser principle in 1958, while a member of
the Bell Laboratories technical staff, and in 1960 he brought this concept to
fruition, successfully operating the well-known and widely used helium-neon
laser. This invention, the first laser to operate continuously, attracted
immediate international attention and laid the foundation for a great deal of
subsequent work.
Prior to his work on the
laser, Professor Javan
developed the theory of
the three level maser
and showed the
importance of phase
coherence in this
microwave device. This
work introduced the
concept of masers
without population
inversion, and he
further extended this
idea to the use of the
stimulated Raman effect
to achieve gain, a
concept that
subsequently led to
novel extensions in the
optical regime.
Professor Javan's continued contributions over the years have advanced diverse
frontiers in the field of quantum electronics. At MIT, he established a major
research laboratory and developed it into the largest university laser research
laboratory throughout the 1960's and 1970's. Many of the early breakthroughs in
the scientific uses of lasers took place there. These include the many
developments in laser spectroscopy at sub-Doppler resolution, which defined the
field of gas phase nonlinear spectroscopy; the first use of lasers to accurately
test the special theory of relativity and the isotropy of space; the
introduction of absolute frequency measurement technology into the optical
region, and the first development of laser atomic clocks.
Professor
Javan has continued to be active in novel areas of research, including his
recent work exploring the effects of coupling light by an optical antenna into a
nanoscale volume of matter. A number of active fields of research have emerged
from his work. His contributions have also extended to applied research areas,
from the development of high energy gas lasers and multistatic laser radars,
controlled by accurate optical clocks, to lasers for medical diagnostic use. He
has supervised the doctoral thesis research of a large number of physics
graduate students. In addition, he has served as an active consultant to
government and industry.
 For his
work on gas lasers, Professor Javan was awarded the 1964 Stewart Ballentine
Medal of the Franklin Institute, the 1966 Fanny and John Hertz Foundation Medal,
the 1975 Fredrick Ives Medal of the Optical Society, and the 1993 Albert
Einstein World Medal of Science of the World Cultural Council. He is a Fellow of
the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
an Associate Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences, and an Honorary
Member of the Trieste Foundation for the Advancement of Science. In 1966 he was
named a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 1979 and 1995 a Humbolt Foundation Fellow.
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