Maurice Goldhaber

Maurice Goldhaber ( born Maurice Goldhaber, born April 18, 1911 in Lviv, then Austria, now Ukraine; † 11 May 2011) was an American physicist.

Born in Austria - Hungary Lviv Goldhaber went to high school in Chemnitz. There he stood in 1928 a model for a sculpture by Henry burner that is no longer visible today in the original version at the local Georgius Agricola -Gymnasium Chemnitz, since it was removed in 1936 because of Jewish background gold Haber. In 1998, the plastic by the sculptor Erik Neukirchen has been redesigned.

Goldhaber studied and worked at the University of Cambridge in England, where he received his doctorate in 1936 and a Fellow of Magdalen College was (until 1938 ).

In 1938 he emigrated to the USA and became an assistant professor and since 1945 professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. From 1950 he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which he (1961 to 1973) successfully launched later as Chairman ( Chairman ) of the Physics Department (1960) and Director. At this time he already led Maurice as a given name. Goldhaber was known as " hands on" director in Brookhaven, that is, he remained active and scientists for work in his time as head of the laboratory scientists were three physics Nobel prizes awarded. From 1961 he was also an Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Goldhaber was known primarily for his work in the field of nuclear and particle physics.

In collaboration with James Chadwick succeeded Goldhaber still a student in 1934 as the first, the mass of neutrons to determine exactly ( in the photo - disintegration of the deuteron ), and thus to prove that neutron particles are independent and not part of protons or electrons. From this study it could be concluded that neutrons are likely to be unstable. This knowledge was crucial to the nuclear and particle physics, where many unstable particles were discovered ( and Goldhaber even suggested in 1954 before one of the first possible instability of the proton, which was later predicted by GUTs but experimentally not decided until today ). After that, he worked intensively with nuclear physics. In the 1930s he discovered Chadwick the disintegration of a series of unstable light nuclei when bombarded with slow neutrons and he also showed the ability to use beryllium as a neutron - moderating substance.

With his wife, Gertrude Scharff- Goldhaber, he showed that the electrons are identical with the atomic electrons in the beta decay. With Edward Teller, he developed the theory of the giant dipole resonance - in atomic nuclei.

In Goldhaber experiment (1956 to 1958 along with Lee Grodzins and Andrew Sunyar ) the helicity of the neutrino was determined - they are left handed, what the VA theory of weak interactions ( and again the parity violation ) confirmed.

After retiring from the Brookhaven Lab, he participated in the Irvine - Michigan - Brookhaven (IMB ) collaboration to study the possibility of proton decay. With a detector they could simultaneously explore the Kamiokande detector, the neutrinos from supernova 1987A. Goldhaber also involved in research on the follow Super - Kamiokande.

For his work Goldhaber has received various awards, including the Tom W. Bonner prize in Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society (APS ) 1971, J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (1982 ), the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Wolf Prize in Physics ( 1991) and the Enrico Fermi Award (1999). He holds honorary doctorates from, among others the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of Tel Aviv. In 1983 he was president of the APS. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After he was able to celebrate its 100th birthday, died Goldhaber after a short illness.

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