Siegbahn, Kai Manne Borje (1918-2007), a Swedish physicist, received half of the 1981 Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the development of high-resolution electron spectroscopy. This is a technique for analyzing materials by bombarding them with beams of X rays and observing electrons that are torn from the atoms by the X rays. This was a powerful new technique for discovering how atoms bond together to form different substances. The other half of the 1981 Nobel Prize was shared by American physicists Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur L. Schawlow for work on a different technique of studying materials, using laser light.
Atoms join together to make chemical substances by electromagnetic interactions between their electrons, particles that make up the outer layers of every atom. X rays, which have high energy, can fling electrons from the inner layers of atoms. Siegbahn found that the energy of the emerging electrons depends on the nature of the chemical bonds between the atoms. This fact can be applied in a technique called electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis (ESCA). Using ESCA, scientists can carry out sensitive analyses of the composition of complex substances, or they can study the workings of the chemical bonds between atoms in a substance.
Siegbahn was born on April 20, 1918, in Lund, Sweden, the son of Karl Manne Siegbahn, who won the 1924 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on X rays. Kai Siegbahn was educated at Uppsala and Stockholm. He became a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1951. Three years later, he became professor and then head of the physics department at Uppsala University, where he taught until he retired in 1984. Siegbahn died on July 20, 2007.
