Hans Heinrich Euler

Hans Heinrich Euler ( born October 6, 1909 in Merano, † 1941 ) was a German physicist.

Life

He received his Ph.D. in 1935 in Leipzig with Werner Heisenberg on the topic "On the scattering of light by light according to Dirac's theory." Second supervisor was Friedrich Hund. After that, he was the successor of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker as an assistant to Heisenberg. Hans Euler was close to the Communists and was shielded by Heisenberg, who worked closely with him in the 1930s, in his Leipzig Institute. Ivan Supek described very well the mood during his stay in Leipzig, beginning with the Kristallnacht 1938: In public, there was shouting, fire was burning and there was hatred of Jews as opposed to the shielded depression in the Institute of Physics (except Erich Bagge not a single Nazi ) where Supek to 1941 worked and had a good relationship with Euler, Heisenberg and dog. The Hitler- Stalin pact and before 1938 experiences in a Nazi training camp, which Euler had to undergo, if he wanted to habilitate, hit him hard. In addition to that his Jewish fiancee had to flee to Switzerland.

After his close friend, the Finn Bernt Olof Grönblom, also a gifted student of Heisenberg, had volunteered on the Finnish side in the Russo- Finnish War ( where he fell in late 1941 ), reported Euler, who had previously not collected because of poor health to volunteer for the Air Force and was 1940/41, used in World War II as a meteorologist in reconnaissance flights over England, Crete and Egypt. Heisenberg's efforts to place him in the uranium project, he refused. In June 1941, he was reported by a reconnaissance flight over the Sea of ​​Azov, near the Crimea as missing. On 24 June 1941, the He 111 the Wekusta 76 ( works number 3205, ID 5Z FA) had made an emergency landing in the Azov Sea 55 km south Melitopol in engine damage and the entire crew was captured the next day by fishermen. Despite intensive efforts by Heisenberg, who for this purpose also the English physicist PAM Blackett intervened ( the connection to the Russians had ), you never learned more about Euler's fate. Heisenberg reported on discussions with Euler in the part and the whole.

Euler was the first physicist who could show that Paul Dirac's introduction of the positron opens up the possibility that photons can scatter with each other by electron-positron pair production, and calculated in his dissertation the cross section for this process. Together with Heisenberg modified Euler Lagrangian of the electromagnetic field in quantum electrodynamics to non-linear terms for the consideration of pair creation from the vacuum.

Writings

• About the scattering of light by light according to the Dirac theory. In: Annals of Physics. Volume 418, 1936, pp. 398-448.
• Bernhard Kockel: About the scattering of light by light according to the Dirac theory. In: Natural Sciences. Volume 23, 1935, p 246