Fritz London

Fritz London, London 1934

Fritz Wolfgang London (born March 7, 1900 in Breslau , † March 30, 1954 in Durham , North Carolina , USA ) was a German-American physicist .

Life

Fritz London came from a wealthy, upper-class German-Jewish family. He studied in Bonn , Frankfurt am Main , Göttingen , Munich and Paris . In 1921 he received his doctorate in Munich. After a brief activity as a teacher, London continued his physics studies in Göttingen and Munich (1922-25), was Paul Peter Ewald's assistant at the Technical University of Stuttgart in 1926/27 and studied with Erwin Schrödinger in Zurich and Berlin . Fritz London completed his habilitation in Berlin in 1928. He gave his first lecture as a private lecturer at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin in the winter semester of 1928/29 on quantum mechanics, especially applications to multi-body problems and chemistry .

Together with Walter Heitler published London, 1927, the first quantum-mechanical treatment of a chemical bond, namely the bond in hydrogen - molecule ( valence bond theory , valence bond, VB theory). After the seizure of power in 1933 he was forced to emigrate and between 1933 and 1936 he worked at Oxford University with his brother Heinz London , who was also a physicist . In 1936 he moved to Paris as research director.

Fritz London at the Bunsen Conference in Munich in 1928

In 1939 London emigrated to the USA, where he became professor of theoretical chemistry at Duke University in Durham. In 1953 he received a professorship for physical chemistry . In 1941 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

plant

Fritz London developed the theory of the chemical bond between homopolar molecules. It is seen as a milestone in modern chemistry . Together with his brother Heinz London, he developed a phenomenological interpretation of superconductivity , which, with the help of quantum mechanics, contributed to a better understanding of chemical observations. In the USA he mainly worked in the field of superfluidity . In 1939 the book La théorie de l'observation en mécanique quantique (51 pages, Paris, Hermann & Cie) appeared, which he had written with Edmond Bauer (1880–1963).

effect

• The London power is named after Fritz London .
• The international Fritz London Prize for Low Temperature Physics is awarded every three years .
• London equation

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The above information comes from the NDB and the Berlin course catalogs for 1928 and 1928/29. Leó Szilárd , John von Neumann , Hartmut Kallman and Fritz London headed the event Discussion of Recent Studies on Quantum Theory in the winter semester of 1928/29 .
2. ↑ See also the obituary for Edmond Bauer by René Taton (1965).

literature

• Kostas Gavroglu: Fritz London - a scientific biography , Cambridge University Press 2005
• Helmut Rechenberg :  London, Fritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-00196-6 , pp. 145 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : Fritz London  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Fritz London in the catalog of the German National Library