Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn was born on April 20, 1918, and died on July 20, 2007. He was a Swedish physicist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics along with others.

Biography

Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn was born on April 20, 1918, in Lund, Sweden. He was the son of Manne Siegbahn, a physicist, and Karin Högbom.

From 1936 to 1942, Siegbahn studied physics, mathematics, and chemistry at Uppsala University. In 1944, he earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Stockholm University. From 1951 to 1954, he worked as a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 1954, he joined Uppsala University, where he taught until he retired in 1984. He also served as President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1981 to 1984.

In 1981, Siegbahn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Arthur Schawlow. He received half of the prize "for his contribution to the development of high-resolution electron spectroscopy." He called his technique Electron Spectroscopy for Chemical Analysis (ESCA), which is now commonly known as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). In 1967, he published a book titled ESCA; atomic, molecular and solid state structure studied by means of electron spectroscopy.

Siegbahn married Anna Brita Rhedin in 1944. Together, they had three sons: Per (born 1945), Hans (born 1947), and Nils (born 1953).

Siegbahn died on July 20, 2007, at the age of 89. At the time of his death, he was still working as a scientist at the Ångström Laboratory at Uppsala University.