Roy J. Glauber

Roy Jay Glauber was an American theoretical physicist who held the Mallinckrodt professorship of physics at Harvard University and an adjunct professorship of optical sciences at the University of Arizona. He was awarded one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence, work published in 1963 that modeled photodetection and explained the fundamental differences between laser light and light from an ordinary bulb, and whose theories are now widely used in quantum optics. In statistical physics he also pioneered the study of the dynamics of first order phase transitions, having been first to define and investigate the stochastic dynamics of an Ising model in a paper also published in 1963.