The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics to three physicists for their work at the frontiers of optics. Roy Glauber of Harvard University is to receive half of the $1.3 million prize “for his contribution to the quantum theory of coherence.” John Hall and Theodor Hänsch will share the other half “for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique.” Hall is affiliated with JILA, NIST, and the University of Colorado, all in Boulder, and Hänsch is at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching. (See figure 1.)
The work by Glauber and others in the 1960s has led to the understanding of phenomena involving intrinsically uncertain numbers of photons, such as arise in quantum communications, quantum computing, and the recording of weak signals. The...
