Alexander Michael Prochoroff was born on 11 July 1916 at Russell Road, Peeramon, Queensland, Australia (now 322 Gadaloff Road, Butchers Creek, situated about 30 km from Atherton), to Mikhail Ivanovich Prokhorov and Maria Ivanovna (née Mikhailova), Russian revolutionaries who had emigrated from Russia to escape repression by the tsarist regime.

Prokhorov graduated with honors in 1939 and moved to Moscow to work at the Lebedev Physical Institute, in the oscillations laboratory headed by academician N. D. Papaleksi.

[1][5][6] In 1947, Prokhorov started working on coherent radiation emitted by electrons orbiting in a cyclic particle accelerator called a synchrotron.

Around that time, he formed a group of young scientists to work on radiospectroscopy of molecular rotations and vibrations, and later on quantum electronics.

Together with Nikolay Basov he developed theoretical grounds for creation of a molecular oscillator and constructed such a device based on ammonia.

He focused on relaxation times of ions of the iron group elements in a lattice of aluminium oxide, but also investigated other, "non-optical", topics, such as magnetic phase transitions in DPPH.

[7] In 1957, while studying ruby, a chromium-doped variation of aluminium oxide, he came upon the idea of using this material as an active medium of a laser.

For his pioneering work on lasers and masers, in 1964, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics shared with Nikolay Basov and Charles Hard Townes.

[9][10] In 1969, Prokhorov became a Hero of Socialist Labour, the highest degree of distinction in the Soviet Union for achievements in national economy and culture.