Otto Robert Frisch

Otto Robert Frisch ( born October 1, 1904 in Vienna, † 22 September 1979 in Cambridge ) was an Austrian- British physicist.

Life

He was born the son of a Jewish lawyer and painter Justinian Fresh and pianist born Auguste fresh Meitner. In 1922 he began his studies in physics at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 1926 with a thesis on the effect of the newly discovered electron on salts. After several years' residence at the Physico- Technical Institute in Berlin he received at Otto Stern at the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Hamburg employment. After Hitler took power in the summer of 1933, he emigrated to London at Birkbeck College, where he worked on the technology of the cloud chamber and artificial radioactivity in the physicist Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett. From 1934 he worked for five years in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr on questions of nuclear physics, in particular to neutron physics. 1936 drilling could win the German Hans von Halban of the ETH Zurich to participate.

During the Christmas holidays in 1938 with his aunt Lise Meitner in Kungälv this was the news that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had the element barium identified in Berlin on the collision of neutrons with uranium nuclei. Hahn could this radiochemical discovery, proof of which he published in the journal Nature Sciences on 6 January 1939 and initially not interpret physically. He had described the process very clearly as a " bursting " of the uranium nucleus. In a famous snow walk Meitner and Frisch found a first physical interpretation of the result of the experiment. They put the first ones on the hypothesis that a splitting of the uranium atom into two parts, ie a " nuclear fission " must be done here. How Meitner and Frisch abschätzten properly at the time, had to have been released as capable of supplying any other process, namely 200 MeV in the process more energy - 200 million electron volts. Fresh observed first the energy fragments by a physical experiment on 13 January 1939 in Copenhagen, thus confirming the nuclear fission in a completely different way. The physical description of the phenomena discovered by Hahn and Strassmann followed on 11 February 1939, separate publication of Meitner and Frisch in "Nature", which explained the physics of nuclear fission behind these observations. Otto Hahn later received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission.

After a trip in the summer of 1939 from Denmark to England Freshly could not return due to the outbreak of the Second World War. With the emerging threats of the Nazi dictatorship, he designed together with the physicist Rudolf Peierls, the fresh - Peierls memorandum. It is viewed as the first theoretical- technical document that describes how an atomic bomb could be constructed by 235U. This memorandum provided both the basis of the British working to build a nuclear bomb ( the Tube Alloys project) as well as the Manhattan Project in the United States dar. Here fresh worked in 1943 after receiving British citizenship in the British delegation.

In 1946 he returned to England, where he headed the nuclear physics department of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. At the same time, he spent the next 30 years, until 1972, in Cambridge as " Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy and fellow" of Trinity College.

Importance

  • He discovered in 1933 along with Otto Stern, the anomalous magnetic moment of the proton. This is the first clue was found out that it is not an elementary particle in this particle.
  • With his aunt Lise Meitner, he wrote in 1939, the first theoretical interpretation of nuclear fission.
  • He created the first theoretical- technical document to build a nuclear bomb using uranium - 235th

Writings (selection )

  • Products of Fission of the uranium nucleus. In: Nature. 143, 1939, pp. 471 f ( with Lise Meitner ).
  • Meet the atom.
  • Progress in Nuclear Physics. 4 volumes. From 1950 to 1955.
  • Atomic Physics Today. In 1961.
  • The elementary particle physics. West German publishing house, Cologne / Opladen 1963.
  • Working with the atom. In 1965.
  • Profession in Nuclear Physics. 1950-65 ( Eds.).
  • What Little I Remember. In 1979. Dt. Issue: What I remember. Physics and physicists of my time. Scientific Publishing Company, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-8047-0614-2.

Swell

Mark Walker: Otto Hahn - responsibility and repression. Research Program " History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism"

September 22 Frisch–Peierls memorandum Integrated Authority File
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