From Scientific American:
This year’s Nobel Prize in physics is split between three scientists in the field of optics. They are Roy Glauber of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., John Hall of the University of Colorado and National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., and Theodor Hänsch of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. Glauber received the award for his theoretical description of the behavior of light particles; Hall and Hänsch used that theory to develop a precision laser than can measure the color of the light of atoms and molecules, which can help identify the composition of materials.
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