Alfred Saupe

Alfred Saupe ( born February 14, 1925 in Badenweiler; † August 3, 2008 ) was a German physicist who made ​​fundamental contributions in the field of liquid crystals.

Saupe, son of Badenweiler hoteliers who attended elementary school in Badenweiler and then high school in garbage home. 1943, in the penultimate school year, he was first drafted into the Reich Labor Service, later came to the Air Force and finally to the paratroopers. January 1945, he arrived in the Netherlands in British captivity. After his release in 1948 he graduated from High School in 1949 at the Freiburg Berthold High School and began to study physics at the Albert- Ludwigs- University of Freiburg.

Both his diploma and his PhD Saupe produced in the liquid crystal group of Wilhelm Maier. During this time, his fundamental work for nematic- isotropic phase transition ( Maier- Saupe theory ) was created. After receiving his doctorate in 1958, he remained at the Physics Institute of the University of Freiburg and initially dealt experimentally and theoretically with UV spectroscopy of liquid crystals and developed the method to determine elastic constants of nematic liquid crystals by means of the Freedericksz transition. In 1961, he moved for a year at the Freiburg Institute of Electrical materials (later Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics), later he became assistant to Maier. He married in 1963 and had three children. During this time Saupe began to engage in NMR of Liquid Crystals. In 1965, after the death of his mentor Maier, he joined Hans -Joachim Cantow (* 1923) to the Freiburg Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, who owned one of the world's first superconducting NMR spectrometer. Here he operated together with Cantow NMR spectroscopy of polymers and could habilitate in Physical Chemistry in 1967.

In 1968, Saupe as visiting professor at the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University, where he accepted a permanent position as professor of physics after two years. He continued working in the area of ​​NMR, as well as, inter alia, chiral smectic phases and elastic properties of nematic liquid crystals. After his retirement in 1992, Saupe was until 1997 head of the Max Planck Research Group " Liquid crystalline systems " in Halle. He spent his final years ill with Parkinson's disease, at his birthplace.

For his work Saupe won many prizes and honors, among others the Nernst Prize of the German Bunsen Society (1974 ), the Humboldt Prize (1987, guest at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research ), and an invitation to the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin ( 1998).