After his sophomore year he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, where (at the age of 18) he was one of the youngest scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

[11][12][13] Roy Glauber’s early work on multiple scattering theory, started in the 1950s and was continued with his students such as Victor Franco.

[14] Specific topics of his research included: the quantum mechanical behavior of trapped wave packets; interactions of light with trapped ions; atom counting-the statistical properties of free atom beams and their measurement; algebraic methods for dealing with fermion statistics; coherence and correlations of bosonic atoms near the Bose–Einstein condensation; the theory of continuously monitored photon counting-and its reaction on quantum sources; the fundamental nature of "quantum jumps"; resonant transport of particles produced multiply in high-energy collisions; the multiple diffraction model of proton-proton and proton-antiproton scattering.

[citation needed] Glauber received the Albert A. Michelson Medal from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (1985),[15] the Max Born Award from the Optical Society of America (1985), the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics from the American Physical Society (1996), and the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics Glauber was awarded the 'Medalla de Oro del CSIC' ('CSIC's Gold Medal') in a ceremony held in Madrid, Spain.

Glauber, a theorist, was awarded half the prize, along with physics experimenters John Hall and Theodor Hänsch, recognized for their work on precision spectroscopy.

Soto-Sanfiel contains Roy J. Glauber's memoirs of the Manhattan Project and aspects of his scientific and personal life, based on a series of interviews conducted in Singapore, Spain, and the U.S.

The same authors produced the documentary "That's the Story: Roy J. Glauber Remembers the Making of the Atomic Bomb," which served as the seed for the book.