Robert W. Field

Robert W. Field, ( born June 13, 1944 in Wilmington, Delaware) is an American chemist who deals with laser spectroscopy and molecular physics.

Field studied chemistry at Amherst College with a bachelor 's degree magna cum laude in 1965 and from Harvard University, where in 1972 he took his master's degree and received his doctorate in the same year with William A. Klemperer. As a post - graduate student, he was from 1971 to 1974 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with Herbert P. Broida and DO Harris. In 1973 he was Assistant Professor, Associate Professor in 1978 and 1982 Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1999 he has been there Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry.

He developed new laser spectroscopic methods such as Stimulated Emission Pumping (SEP ). By applying to highly excited vibrational states of polyatomic molecules, he found James L. Kinsey and Robert J. Silbey first evidence of quantum chaos in isolated single molecules. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society ( 1981), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( 2002), the Optical Society of America ( 1994) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (2009 ).

In 1980 he received the Herbert P. Broida Price, Earle K. Plyler Prize in 1988, 1990 Ellis Lippincott Award, 1996 William F. Meggers Award and the 2006 Bomem - Michelson Award. In 2011 he received a Humboldt Research Award. 1975-1977 he was the Sloan Fellow.

In 2009 he was awarded the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Physics for pioneering work on the development and application of laser spectroscopy with multiple resonances and effective model Hamiltonians, the basic mechanisms of breakage of chemical bonds, rearrangement of electrons in molecules, redistribution of intramolecular vibrations and unimolecular isomerization revealed.

Writings

• Hélène Lefebvre -Brion: Perturbations in the Spectra of Diatomic Molecules, Academic Press 1986
• Hélène Lefebvre -Brion: The Spectra and Dynamics of Diatomic Molecules, Elsevier 2004