Nicolaas Bloembergen

Nicolaas Bloembergen was born on March 11, 1920, in Dordrecht, Netherlands, where his father was a chemical engineer and executive. He had five siblings, with his brother Auke later becoming a legal scholar. Bloembergen entered Utrecht University in 1938 to study physics, receiving his candidate (Phil. cand.) and doctorandus (Phil. drs.) degrees in 1941 and 1943, respectively. In 1943, during the German occupation of the Netherlands, the German authorities closed the University and Bloembergen spent two years in hiding. Through Purcell, Bloembergen was part of the prolific academic lineage tree of J. J. Thomson, which includes many other Nobel Laureates, beginning with Thomson himself (Physics Nobel, 1906) and Lord Rayleigh (Physics Nobel, 1904), Ernest Rutherford (Chemistry Nobel 1908), Owen Richardson (Physics Nobel, 1928), and finally Purcell (Physics, Nobel 1952). Bloembergen's other influences include John Van Vleck (Physics Nobel, 1977) and Percy Bridgman (Physics Nobel, 1946). Six weeks before his arrival, Purcell and his graduate students Torrey and Pound discovered nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Bloembergen returned to the Netherlands in 1947, and submitted his doctoral thesis, Nuclear Magnetic Relaxation, at Leiden University. This was because he had completed all the preliminary examinations in the Netherlands, and Cornelis Jacobus Gorter of Leiden offered him a postdoctoral appointment there. He received his Ph.D. from Leiden in 1948, and then was a postdoc at Leiden for about a year. == Career ==

In 1949, Bloembergen returned to Harvard as a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows. In 1951, he became an associate professor; he then became Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics in 1957; Rumford Professor of Physics in 1974; and Gerhard Gade University Professor in 1980. He retired from Harvard in 1990. == Research ==

By 1960 while at Harvard, Bloembergen experimented with microwave spectroscopy. and in 1956, he developed a crystal maser, which was more powerful than the standard gaseous version. From this theoretical work, Bloembergen found ways to combine two or more laser sources consisting of photons in the visible light frequency range to generate a single laser source with photons of different frequencies in the infrared and ultraviolet ranges, which extends the amount of atomic detail that can be gathered from laser spectroscopy. == Personal life and death ==

Bloembergen met Huberta Deliana "Deli" Brink in 1948 while on vacation with his university's Physics Club. She was able to travel with him to the United States in 1949 on a student hospitality exchange program; he proposed to her when they arrived in the States, and were married by 1950 on return to Amsterdam. Bloembergen died on September 5, 2017, at an assisted living facility in his hometown Tucson, Arizona, of cardiorespiratory failure at the age of 97. His wife died on June 19, 2019. == Biography ==

In 2016 a Dutch biography was published, and in 2019 an English one. == Recognition ==

Memberships Awards National awards Honorary degrees == Legacy ==

On March 11, 2020, the day of Bloembergen's 100th birthday, a team of researchers at the University of New South Wales published an article in Nature, demonstrating for the first time the successful coherent control of the nucleus of a single atom using only electric fields, an idea first proposed by Bloembergen back in 1961. == Notes ==