Nikolai Alexandrovich Borisevich (born 21.09.1923) was a Soviet physicist, academician (1981; corresponding member 1972), academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (1969) and president of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR from 1969. He was born in the village of Luchnoy Most (now in Minsk region). He graduated from Byelorussian University (1950). From 1955 he was at the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (head of a laboratory from 1955, and in 1955—69 deputy director).
His work was in the field of molecular spectroscopy and luminescence, infrared technology and quantum electronics. He developed a statistical theory of the photophysical processes in complex molecules and proposed experimental methods of studying them, and he worked out optical methods of determining the temperature of molecules and other molecular constants. He detected delayed thermally activated fluorescence and a new kind of cooperative luminescence of complex molecules in the gas phase. He studied and developed a new class of optical filters for the broad infrared region of the spectrum (USSR State Prize, 1973). He was one of the authors of the discovery of the phenomenon of the stabilisation-labilisation of electronically excited polyatomic molecules. He was the first to obtain lasing in polyatomic molecules in the gas phase. He developed gas optical quantum generators with nonlinear selective losses and single-frequency helium-neon lasers with a considerable output power.
Hero of Socialist Labour (1978). In 1980 he was awarded the Lenin Prize, together with others, for a series of works on the spectroscopy of complex molecules. A foreign member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (1978).