Aleksander Jablonski

Aleksander Jabłoński was a Polish physicist and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was a pioneer of molecular photophysics, creating the concept of the "luminescent centre" and his own theories of concentrational quenching and depolarization of photoluminescence. He also worked on pressure broadening of emission spectra lines and was the first to recognize the analogy between pressure broadening and molecular spectra. This led to the development of the quantum-mechanical pressure broadening theory. He is most famous for proposing the Jablonski diagram in 1933, which illustrates the absorption and emission of light by molecules. He was born on 26 February 1898 in Woskresenówka, near Kharkiv, in Imperial Russia. He attended high school and music school in Kharkiv, where he learned to play the violin. In 1916, he started to study physics at the University of Kharkiv, but had to interrupt his studies due to World War I. He served in the Polish I Corps in Russia and fought in the Polish-Soviet War, for which he was awarded the Cross of Valour. He settled in Warsaw in 1918 and resumed his studies at the University of Warsaw. He also studied the violin at the Warsaw Conservatory, under the virtuoso Stanisław Barcewicz. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw in 1930, writing a thesis on the influence of the change of the wavelength of excitation light on the fluorescence spectra. He then went to Berlin and Hamburg as a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, where he worked with Peter Pringsheim and Otto Stern. He returned to Poland in 1934 and received his habilitation from the University of Warsaw. His thesis was on the influence of intermolecular interactions on the absorption and emission of light, the subject to which he devoted the rest of his life. He served as the president of the Polish Physical Society between 1957 and 1961. He died on 9 September 1980 in Skierniewice, Poland.