The news of the untimely and tragic death of Nikolai Ivanovich Koroteev, director of the International Laser Centre, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Head of the Chair of General Physics and Wave Processes, Faculty of Physics, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, came as a great shock to the other members of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy. The Raman community lost with Nikolai a leading scientist in the field of non-linear optics and particularly of non-linear Raman spectroscopy. He was one of the pioneers of what he first called 'Active Raman Spectroscopy' and which became later on known as 'Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy (CARS)'. His premature death at the age of 51 deprived the world of physics of an outstanding member, a brilliant leader and a very bright personality, whose talents and personal charm were appreciated by everyone who had the pleasure of knowing him.
Nikolai Ivanovich Koroteev was born on 2 April, 1947, in the city of Stalingrad, which was later given the name of Volgograd and which will forever remain in history as the city where one of the bloodiest battles-the Stalingrad battle-took place. We know very well how much time and effort it takes to become a physicist. Nikolai became a student of the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University in 1965. Having graduated from this faculty, he became a PhD student at the same faculty in 1971 and received his Candidate of Science (PhD) degree in 1974. Being a PhD student, he was in a research team supervised by Sergei Aleksandrovich Akhmanov, one of the pioneers of non-linear optics in the former Soviet Union, developing new applications of coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering. It was in 1972 that they published one of the first papers on this subject. The abbreviation CARS was not as widely accepted at that time as it is now. So, the four-photon process they used for spectroscopic purposes, which is now well known as CARS, was called active spectroscopy of Raman scattering, as already mentioned above. This term is still very often used in Russian literature. It should be mentioned that they already used an optical parametric oscillator as a source of frequency-tunable radiation for coherent Raman measurements at that time. OPOs are nowadays very popular as elements of CARS and femtosecond laser systems.
In 1978, Nikolai received a fellowship at Stanford University. At that time, it was not very often that a person from the Soviet Union could go and work abroad for a relatively long period, and many people who knew him then are sure that it was another very important point in his biography, as he had an opportunity to work in one of the best American laboratories and meet many people who later became famous for their research in coherent nonlinear spectroscopy. He also published several important papers on polarization spectroscopy while staying with the Stanford group, including a paper in Physical Review Letters on coherent ellipsometry, substantially extending the opportunities of coherent four-photon techniques.
Back in the USSR, he published a comprehensive monograph together with S.A. Akhmanov entitled 'Methods of Nonlinear Optics in Light Scattering Spectroscopy' (Nauka, Moscow, 1981). It was published in Russian and is widely cited in Russian literature, but it was never translated into English. Very soon, Nikolai Koroteev received his Doctor of Science degree in Physics and Mathematics (1983) and became a full professor in 1986.
By that time Nikolai had published several review papers on polarizationsensitive four-photon spectroscopy, which summarized the results of his efforts in the development of this technique. One of these papers was a review in