Eugene Feenberg

Eugene Feenberg ( born October 6, 1906 in Fort Smith, Texas, † November 7, 1977 ) was an American physicist who worked on quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

Biography

Feenberg studied from 1926 to 1929 at the University of Texas at Austin physics and mathematics and then went to Harvard University to graduate with Edwin Kemble. In between, he was from 1931 to 1933 with a scholarship to study in Europe, with Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich, Enrico Fermi in Rome ( where he also met Ettore Majorana ), Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich and Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig. In 1933 he received his doctorate at Kemble at Harvard on the quantum theory of scattering of slow electrons to neutral atoms. After that, he was instructor at Harvard, where he studied nuclear physics. From 1935 he was at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, where he worked with Gregory 's breadth above the charge independence of nuclear forces and Eugene Paul Wigner on nuclear structure of light p- shell nuclei. From 1936 to 1938 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked with Melba Phillips. Then he was at Washington Square College of New York University, where he was an associate professor. During World War II he worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Company on radar tubes (theory of the klystron ).

In 1946 he was associate professor and finally professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he worked on the then new shell model of nuclei in the 1950s. In 1964, he was there Wayman Crow Professor of Physics. In 1975, he retired. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton University (1953 /4), at the State University of New York at Stony Brook ( 1969) and Mexico City ( 1974).

In 1975, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

Writings

• George Edward Pake Notes on the Quantum Theory of Angular Momentum, Addison -Wesley, 1953, 1958 Stanford University Press, 1959, Dover, 1999

• Shell Theory of the Nucleus, Princeton University, 1955

• Quantum theory of fluid, Academic Press, 1967, 1969