Light and matter interacting at the scale of individual atoms.
10 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Nobel Lecture: The Molecular Scattering of Light
C. V. Raman · 1930
Reports that light scattered by a molecule sometimes shifts colour by an amount fixed by the molecule's own vibration frequencies, giving a…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Nobel Lecture: Spectroscopic Studies of Molecular Structure
Gerhard Herzberg · 1971
Shows how the fine structure of a molecule's absorption and emission spectrum reveals its bond lengths, vibration frequencies and even the fleeting…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules
Niels Bohr · 1913
Proposes that electrons occupy only certain fixed orbits and jump between them by emitting or absorbing a quantum of light, explaining the hydrogen…
+5 more at this level
12 works
C. V. Raman
Reports that light scattered by a molecule sometimes shifts colour by an amount fixed by the molecule's own vibration frequencies, giving a spectroscopic window onto molecular structure independent of infrared absorption.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles K. Kao
Argues that the light loss in glass fibres was an engineering impurity problem rather than a fundamental limit, and that purifying the glass enough would let light carry signals for kilometres instead of metres.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gerhard Herzberg
Shows how the fine structure of a molecule's absorption and emission spectrum reveals its bond lengths, vibration frequencies and even the fleeting existence of free radicals too short-lived to isolate any other way.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Wolfgang Paul
Shows that an oscillating electric field alone, with no static field, can trap a charged particle in three dimensions, the principle behind the modern ion trap.
17 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Wolfgang Ketterle
Describes cooling a dilute atomic gas until the atoms' wavefunctions overlap and merge into one macroscopic matter wave, realising a state predicted seventy years earlier.
40 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026George E. Smith
Describes building a device that stores an image as a pattern of charge shifted across a silicon chip one row at a time, replacing photographic film with a sensor that reads out electronically.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Niels Bohr
Proposes that electrons occupy only certain fixed orbits and jump between them by emitting or absorbing a quantum of light, explaining the hydrogen spectrum for the first time.
25 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026P. A. Franken, A. E. Hill, C. W. Peters & G. Weinreich
Reports the first observation of second-harmonic generation, shining a ruby laser through quartz and finding a faint trace of ultraviolet light at exactly twice the input frequency, the experiment that founded nonlinear optics.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles H. Townes
Explains how stimulating already-excited atoms to emit in lockstep produces light of a single phase and frequency, the principle behind the maser and the laser.
24 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Nicolaas Bloembergen
Shows that at the light intensities a laser makes possible, a material's polarisation response stops being proportional to the field and starts mixing frequencies together, turning optics into a nonlinear science.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Roy J. Glauber
Argues that ordinary and laser light differ in the statistics of their photons, not just their intensity, and works out the quantum states that distinguish them.
35 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Andrew D. Ludlow, Martin M. Boyd, Jun Ye, Ekkehard Peik & Piet O. Schmidt
Surveys how trapping atoms and probing an optical rather than microwave transition pushed clock precision to a part in 10^18, and argues the limits are now technical, not fundamental.
87 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026