Roy Jay Glauber

From the Nobel Foundation:

After another year he spent at the Institute, Oppy [J. Robert Oppenheimer] found him a teaching position. It was only a temporary one, replacing Feynman at Caltech...His research for the year was devoted to resolving a puzzle they had encountered in studying electron diffraction by molecules. Solving the problem didn't interest him in molecules very much, but it did involve him deeply in scattering problems in which the incident particles were of wavelength much smaller than the ranges of interactions. Those problems, he understood, would become steadily more important in nuclear physics as accelerator energies were increased. He continued studying those problems then when he was invited back to Harvard in the fall of 1952 and for some years after that. The result was a species of nuclear diffraction theory analogous in some ways to optical diffraction theory, but generalized to include inelastic collisions between incident particles and complex nuclear systems. The theory is even used these days to treat the high-energy collisions of pairs of heavy nuclei...

...The late 50's proved to be an exciting time for many reasons. A radically new light source, the laser, was being developed and there were questions in the air regarding the quantum structure of its output. That was particularly so in view of the surprising discovery of quantum correlations in ordinary light by Hanbury Brown and Twiss…That was the period in which he began to work on quantum optics with a surmise that the Hanbury Brown-Twiss correlation would be found absent from a stable laser beam, and then followed it with a sequence of more general papers on photon statistics and the meaning of coherence.

"Roy J. Glauber: Biographical," Nobel Foundation (2005)

Nobel Laureate, Physics Prize, 2005