Rudolf Mössbauer

Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer ( born January 31, 1929 in Munich, † 14 September 2011 in Green Forest, Landkreis München ) was a German physicist and discoverer of the Mössbauer effect, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1961.

Life

1948 Mössbauer made ​​his Abitur at the Oberrealschule Munich -Pasing. As his interest in physics was awakened by the German Museum, as Mössbauer said he studied this subject and put 1955 his diploma.

1955 to 1957 he conducted experiments at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg through and made a dissertation on " nuclear resonance fluorescence of gamma rays in the iridium 191 " to. Here he succeeded in the first observation of recoilless nuclear resonance absorption, the Mössbauer effect. In the year 1958, with the oral examination, the PhD with Professor Heinz Maier- Leibnitz, Technical University of Munich. Again at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, he succeeded in 1958, the direct experimental evidence of the Mössbauer effect. From 1960, he conducted research at CalTech and received in 1961 along with Robert Hofstadter the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his investigations on the resonance absorption of gamma radiation and the made ​​in this context discovery of the effect named after him ." From 1964 he worked again at the TU Munich. He took part in the West German debate about the reform of higher education and tried positive experience from his time in the U.S. ( in particular structural advantages of the " Department " system ) into Germany. A corresponding transformation of the physics institutes, he also made it a condition of his return to Munich in 1965.

From 1972 to 1977 he served as one of the two directors of the Institute Laue -Langevin (ILL ), Grenoble / France, which operates a high-flux neutron reactor there. He then worked at the Technical University Munich again, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1997.

Miniaturized versions of the eponymous Mössbauer spectrometer for the analysis of, inter alia, iron-containing substances have been used successfully in the two NASA Mars probes Spirit and Opportunity. Using the Mössbauer effect led Robert Pound and Glen Rebka 1960, the detection of gravitational redshift - corresponds to a time dilation - in the gravitational field of the earth.

In the early 1970s he turned to the neutrino physics, first at the ILL and then in Munich.

Rudolf Mössbauer was also a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (Rome), the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and since 1970 member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.