Alan E. Florin

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Alan E. Florin ( January 12, 1920 - April 7, 1994 ) was an American nuclear chemist .

In the 1940s he worked at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in the Manhattan Project . At that time the laboratory (under the direction of Glenn T. Seaborg ) was in competition with the larger metallurgical laboratory for plutonium in Los Alamos, which was under construction, and had only limited opportunities to experiment with plutonium. The aim was initially to make pure plutonium metal and to determine its physical properties, especially its density. Florin was in the laboratory from August 1943. He had already succeeded in preparing neptunium hexafluoride , for which Seaborg and Harrison S. Brown applied for a patent.

After the war he was at Los Alamos National Laboratory , where he produced plutonium hexafluoride in large quantities around 1950 and determined its properties (published in a Los Alamos Report 1950). The compound is the only stable plutonium compound that is volatile at low temperatures and is therefore suitable for isotope separation in the gas state. The analogue uranium compound had been known for a long time.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Social Security Death Index.
  2. ↑ Lillian Hoddeson et al. a. Critical Assembly. A technical history of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer years 1943-1945 , Cambridge University Press 1993, ISBN 978-0-521-54117-6 , pp. 207-208. Florin was one of the informants for the book and was living in Los Alamos at the time.
  3. ↑ According to Seaborg's diary entries, Florin could not be entered because he was not yet officially involved in the Manhattan Project. Journal of Glenn T. Seaborg 1946-1958, Lawrence Berkeley Lab 1990.
  4. ↑ LAMS 1118, PDF . The follow-up report LA 1168 from 1951, PDF .
personal data
SURNAME Florin, Alan E.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1920
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1994