INSIGHTS | PERSPECTIVESsciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: STEPHAN SAVOIA/AP PHOTOBy Marlan O. Scully1,2,3 and
Sudhakar Prasad4,5R
oy Glauber, theoretical physicist and
recipient of half of the 2005 Nobel
Prize in Physics, passed away on 26
December 2018. He was 93. Roy was
universally revered as a pioneer of
the fields of nuclear scattering and
quantum optics. His early elucidation of
the quantum mechanical underpinnings of
optical coherence formed the basis for ad-
vances in laser physics and quantum optics.
His optical approximations to high-energy
nuclear scattering still serve as the starting
point of more detailed analyses of such scat-
tering phenomena.
Roy was a child prodigy. In his early years,
he made a working reflection telescope and,
after learning that the spectra of starlight
were key to further understanding stars,
a spectrometer. He graduated from the fa-
mous Bronx School of Science high school
in 1941 at age 16. Although he had originally
planned to attend Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute and major in engineering, a full
scholarship persuaded him to attend Har-
vard University instead.
His undergraduate years were dramati-
cally altered by the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. The faculty began leaving Harvard
for wartime positions, and Roy was invited
to work on the Manhattan Project, at just 18
years of age. He spent 2 years in Los Alamos
in the company of esteemed physicists such
as John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, Niels
Bohr, Hans Bethe, and J. Robert Oppen-
heimer. For the Trinity test (the first nuclear
detonation), Roy and some of his young col-
leagues climbed a nearby mountain in the
hopes of seeing the event. They had already
begun to pack up, assuming that they had
missed it or that it hadn’t worked, when the
southern sky lit up. The image was indelibly
burned into Roy’s memory.
Roy then returned to Harvard and joined
theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger’s
group. Although he never published with
Schwinger, the aspects of coherent meson-pion physics he learned while working with
him strongly influenced Roy’s later work
on the photon coherent state. After earning
his bachelor’s degree in 1946 and his Ph.D.
in 1949, both from Harvard, Roy spent 6
months in Zürich, Switzerland, with the fa-
mous theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli,
and then accepted an invitation from Oppen-
heimer to work at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Next, he spent a year researching the elec-
tron diffraction of molecules in the Caltech
chemistry department under Linus Pauling.
There, he developed an accurate approxima-
tion of this problem by adapting the more
familiar methods of optical diffraction. He re-
alized that his approach to nuclear scattering
analysis would become increasingly impor-
tant as improved particle-accelerator design
enabled higher particle energies. He left
Caltech to join the faculty at Harvard, where
he continued his studies of nuclear scattering
over the next decade. The well-known Glau-
ber-eikonal theory of high-energy nuclearscattering that eventually emerged from this
work is still used to treat high-energy colli-
sions of heavy nuclei as a probe of their de-
tailed structure.
After the first experiments of Hanbury
Brown and Twiss on intensity interferometry
in 1954, Roy became interested in the higher-
order field correlation functions. He pro-
duced a beautiful account of the multiphoton
interference phenomena using such correla-
tion functions, which serve as a valuable tool
in quantum optics. He also authored an in-
sightful paper on the stochastic dynamics of
the kinetic Ising model, which has been used
more recently to treat the nonexponential re-
laxation of linear-chain polymers.
In addition to Roy’s outstanding physics
research, he was an excellent teacher, con-
tributing mightily to the education and un-
derstanding of generations of physicists. His
1963 papers on the quantum theory of opti-
cal coherence, which earned him the Nobel
Prize, were pedagogical masterpieces; they
read like a textbook. Committed to his teach-ing, he rarely missed a class, even on the day
he learned that he had won the Nobel. As a
fellow of the Texas A&M University Hagler
Institute for Advanced Study, he lectured
widely in Texas and beyond.
Roy was a frequent participant in confer-
ences around the world and a popular key-
note speaker at many conference banquets,
regaling his fellow attendees with his wry
sense of humor, quirky quips, and impressive
recall. His sense of humor was on full display
at the Ig Nobel awards, a Nobel Prize parody
that recognizes achievements in seemingly
absurd (ignoble) research. As part of the an-
nual ceremony, paper airplanes are launched
en masse toward the stage. For years, Roy
gleefully served as “keeper of the broom,”
sweeping up the piles of airplanes.
S.P. met Roy in 1978 and went on to be-
come his last Ph.D. student. Roy was a de-
manding and inspirational mentor. A knock
on his door would be met with his signature
cough, followed by his clarion voice summon-
ing his visitor. He insisted that his students
acquire a broad foundation of physics before
thinking about research, and he required
them to think clearly and express their points
with clarity. When researchers suggested that
they may have settled on a solution to a ques-
tion, he would find another important aspect
of the problem for them to explore. Roy was
rarely persuaded that a manuscript was ready
until he had thoroughly vetted it for rigor and
clarity, a process that could take months.
M.O.S. was fortunate to have Roy as a
mentor and friend for his entire career. They
often hiked together. On one outing, they
encountered a rattlesnake and turned it into
a hatband. On another, they saw a school of
fish, and Roy joked that the fish obeyed the
Poisson statistics of coherent light. Every ex-
perience was more fun with Roy.
Roy was a dedicated father who raised his
children, Jeff and Valerie, as a single par-
ent. He admitted without regret that he had
traded some of his scientific research pursuits
for the rewards of fatherhood. Roy’s partner
in later years, Atholie Rosett, accompanied
him to Sweden for the Nobel festivities in- We of Roy’s extended family regard her
affectionately and with much appreciation
for making Roy’s later years pleasant and
productive.
Roy retired from Harvard in 2012, took
up a position at Texas A&M, and continued
to enjoy traveling to conferences around the
world. He remained active and lucid to the
very end. A veritable giant of modern theo-
retical physics and a teacher at his very core,
he will continue to enrich the lives of gen-
erations of physicists and students to come.
His legacy as a scientist, educator, father, and
friend lives on. j
10.1126/science.aaw7706
(^1) Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA. (^2) Princeton
University, Princeton, NJ, USA.^3 Baylor University, Waco,
TX, USA.^4 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
(^5) University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA. Email:
[email protected]
RETROSPECTIVE
Roy Glauber
(1925–2018)
Father of quantum optics
698 15 FEBRUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6428
Published by AAAS
on February 14, 2019^
http://science.sciencemag.org/
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