George Placzek

George Placzek (also: Georg Placzek; born September 26, 1905 in Brno, † October 16, 1955 in Zurich ) was a physicist.

Placzek studied physics in Prague and Vienna; In 1928 he received his doctorate. From 1932 to 1939 he conducted research and taught in Copenhagen, Kharkov, Paris, Jerusalem, and at Cornell University. Together with Niels Bohr and Rudolf Peierls he drew up a basic for the further development of nuclear research theory of neutron- induced nuclear reactions. Since 1942, he worked on neutron diffusion. In 1943 he became president of the Theoretical Physics Division of the Canadian Nuclear Research Laboratory in the Chalk River Laboratories. In 1945, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1946 he was employed by the General Electric Company and in 1948 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Works

• Together with Max Planck, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Max Delbrück, among other things: The universe in the light of modern physics. London 1931.
• Rayleigh scattering and Raman effect. Leipzig 1934.
• Together with Kenneth Case and Frederic de Hoffmann: Introduction to the theory of neutron diffusion. Volume 1 Los Alamos, N.M., 1953.
• The Rayleigh and Raman scattering. Berkeley, California, 1959.