Nikolay Basov

Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov was born on 14 December 1922 in Usman, Russia, the son of Gennady Fedorovich Basov and Zinaida Andreevna Molchanova. Basov finished high school in 1941 in Voronezh, and was later called for military service at the Kuibyshev Military Medical Academy. In 1943, he left the academy and served in the Red Army participating in the Second World War with the 1st Ukrainian Front. In 1945, Basov entered the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI). In 1950, he began his postgraduate studies at the MEPhI, although he worked on his Candidate of Sciences thesis at the Lebedev Physical Institute (LPI)—under the supervision of Mikhail Leontovich and Alexander Prokhorov—receiving his degree in 1953. Basov defended his Doctor of Sciences thesis, A Molecular Oscillator, in 1956. In 1950, Basov married Ksenia Tikhonovna, who was also a physicist. They had two sons, Gennady (born 1954) and Dmitry (born 1963). == Career and research ==

Basov was Director of the LPI from 1973 to 1988. He was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Russian Academy of Sciences since 1991) in 1962 and Full Member of the Academy in 1966. He was Honorary President and Member of the International Academy of Science, Munich. He was the head of the laboratory of quantum radiophysics at the LPI until his death in 2001. N.G.Basov encouraged the researchers in nonlinear optics in Lebedev Institute who discovered the optical phase conjugation. Basov died on 1 July 2001 in Moscow at the age of 78, and was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery. == Politics ==

He entered politics in 1951 and became a member of parliament (the Soviet of the Union of the Supreme Soviet) in 1974. Following U.S. President Ronald Reagan's speech on SDI in 1983, Basov signed a letter along with other Soviet scientists condemning the initiative, which was published in the New York Times. In 1985 he declared the Soviet Union was capable of matching SDI proposals made by the U.S. == Awards ==

• N. G. Basov, K. A. Brueckner (Editor-in-Chief), S. W. Haan, C. Yamanaka. Inertial Confinement Fusion, 1992, Research Trends in Physics Series published by the American Institute of Physics Press (presently Springer, New York). . • V. Stefan and N. G. Basov (Editors). Semiconductor Science and Technology, Volume 1. Semiconductor Lasers. (Stefan University Press Series on Frontiers in Science and Technology) (Paperback), 1999. . • V. Stefan and N. G. Basov (Editors). Semiconductor Science and Technology, Volume 2: Quantum Dots and Quantum Wells. (Stefan University Press Series on Frontiers in Science and Technology) (Paperback), 1999. . == See also ==