| Willis Lamb | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 12, 1913 Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Died | May 15, 2008 (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, 1913 – May 15, 2008) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 together with Polykarp Kusch "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb and 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. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.[1]
Lamb married his first wife, Ursula Schaefer in 1939. In 1996 he married physicist Bruria Kaufman, whom he later divorced. In 2008 he married Elsie Wattson.
Lamb died on May 15, 2008, at the age of 94.
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