1921-

American physicist whose early collaborations with Charles Townes on masers resulted in their 1955 Microwave Spectroscopy. They extended maser principles to light in 1958 when they published the first detailed proposal for building a laser. Schawlow won a share of the 1981 Nobel Prize in physics for developments in laser spectroscopy, especially for the advanced techniques used by his Stanford research group to reveal details of atomic spectra and give improved values for fundamental constants.