Academician A.M. Prokhorov and Femto-Atto-Photoelectronics (Memorial Lecture)

摘要

The Great Russian physicist Academician A.M. Prokhorov passed away on the 8-th of January 2002 in Moscow. He was born in Australia (Atorton Town) on the 11-th of July 1916. Together with Academician N.G. Basov and Prof. C.H. Townes in 1964, he received the Nobel Prize in physics for discovery the fundamental operational principles of the LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission and Radiation). Among the great variety of scientific and technological areas to which Academician A.M. Prokhorov had devoted his extraordinary talent and his encyclopedical knowledge in physics, is the ultrafast photoelectronics and in particular image-converter high-speed photography. As early as at the beginning of the sixties, he clearly realized the importance and valuability of ultrafast image tubes application for gaining direct visual information in laser research. It was Academician A.M. Prokhorov who had initiated the image tube photography development specially oriented for laser investigations, providing steadily improvement of its time resolution starting from subnanosecond level in the sixties of the 20-th Century down to subfemtosecond level at the begining of the 21-st Century. The new area of high-speed research, known as Femto-Attosecond Photoelectronics, is now established as the outstanding result of his imaginative efforts. In this memorial lecture some important achievements in the ultrafast photoelectronics attained under Academician A.M. Prokhorov supervision will be pointed out. Memorized are some perspective targets in high-speed image-converter photography to which Academician A.M. Prokhorov has been concerned during the last period of his brilliant and creative life.