Willis Lamb

Willis Lamb

Willis Eugene Lamb Jr. (1913-2008)
Born July 12, 1913(1913-07-12)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Died May 15, 2008(2008-05-15) (aged 94)
Tucson, Arizona, U.S.
Nationality United States
Fields Physics
Institutions University of Arizona
University of Oxford
Yale
Columbia
Stanford
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor J. Robert Oppenheimer
Doctoral students Theodore Maiman
Marlan Scully
Balázs László Győrffy
Frederick Hopf
Murray Sargent III
Stanley L. Kaufman
David Mader
Ralph Jacobs
Known for Lamb shift
Laser Theory
Quantum Optics
Notable awards Nobel Prize in Physics (1955)

Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr. (July 12, 1913May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb and Polykarp Kusch were able to precisely determine certain electromagnetic properties of the electron. See Lamb shift. Lamb was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences.

Lamb was born in Los Angeles, California, United States and attended Los Angeles High School. First admitted in 1930, he received a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Mössbauer. Lamb was the Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1962, and also taught at Yale, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Arizona. Lamb died on May 15, 2008, at the age of 94.

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