Martin Deutsch
German Martin ( born January 15, 1917 in Vienna, † August 16 2002 in Cambridge ( Massachusetts)) was an American experimental physicist. He discovered positronium.
Life
German was born the son of a Jewish doctors married couple ( Felix and Helene German ). His mother Helene German (1884-1982) was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna and recent student of Sigmund Freud, who in 1923 made it the leader of his Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute. Because of the increase of anti-Semitism in 1934, the family fled to Zurich, where German went to school and began to study at the ETH. October 1935, he moved with his family to the United States to Cambridge and German continued his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) continue, including in the laboratory of the experimental physicist George Harrison. In 1937 he acquired there the bachelor's degree and in 1941 he received his PhD Robley D. Evans ( A study of nuclear radiations by Means of a magnetic lens beta ray spectrometer ).
Since he was still officially a German citizen, he could not initially be working for the Manhattan Project. From 1943 he worked in Los Alamos at Emilio Segre, and Victor Weisskopf ( who had visited a little earlier than this same school as German in Vienna). Under Segre he studied there mainly with the experimental investigation of the physics of nuclear fission rather than technical issues of bombs designs.
From 1946 he was at MIT, where he was professor and remained until his retirement. 1973 to 1979 he was head of the Laboratory of Nuclear Science ( LNS) at MIT, followed by Francis Low.
In 1951 he succeeded in the experimental confirmation of the existence of positronium, an important system for precise test which are currently under development at that time quantum electrodynamics. German surveyed also its range and other physical properties. Since it consists of an electron and its antiparticle, the positron, it annihilates in a very short time into photons: in the ground state tenth nanosecond in para- positronium ( spin 0 ), which in two or more generally annihilates an even number of photons, 140 nanoseconds at ortho- positronium (spin 1), which is divided into three photons. The existence had predicted, and Carl David Anderson in 1932 theoretically.
He was married in 1939 and had two children, including L. Peter German, the developer of Ghostscript and founder of the software company Aladdin. Among his students is one of Henry W. Kendall. German also brought Samuel Chao Chung Ting at MIT, where he performed the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Since 1958 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.