Alfred Saupe

Alfred Saupe.

Alfred Saupe (born February 14, 1925 in Badenweiler ; † August 3, 2008 ibid) was a German physicist who did fundamental work in the field of liquid crystals .

Saupe, son of a Badenweiler hotelier, attended elementary school in Badenweiler and then high school in Müllheim . In 1943, in the penultimate school year, he was first drafted into the Reich Labor Service , later joined the Air Force and finally joined the paratroopers . January 1945 he was taken prisoner by the British in the Netherlands . After his release in 1948, he graduated from high school in 1949 at the Freiburg Berthold-Gymnasium and began studying physics at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg .

Saupe completed both his diploma and doctoral theses in Wilhelm Maier's liquid crystal group . During this time his fundamental work on the nematic - isotropic phase transition ( Maier-Saupe theory ) was created. After receiving his doctorate in 1958, he stayed at the Physics Institute of the University of Freiburg and initially worked experimentally and theoretically with UV spectroscopy on liquid crystals and developed the method of determining elastic constants of nematic liquid crystals using the Freedericksz transition . In 1961 he moved to the Freiburg Institute for Electrical Materials (later the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics ) for a year , after which he became Maier's assistant. He married in 1963 and had three children. During this time Saupe began to work with NMR on liquid crystals. In 1965, after the death of his mentor Maier, he moved to Hans-Joachim Cantow (1923–2018) at the Freiburg Institute for Macromolecular Chemistry, which owned one of the world's first superconducting NMR spectrometers. Here he operated together with Cantow NMR spectroscopy on polymers and was able to do his habilitation in physical chemistry in 1967 .

In 1968 Saupe went to the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University as a visiting professor , where after two years he accepted a permanent position as professor of physics. There he continued to work in the field of NMR, as well as on chiral smectic phases and elastic properties of nematic liquid crystals. After his retirement in 1992, Saupe was head of the Max Planck working group “Liquid Crystalline Systems” in Halle until 1997 . He spent his last years, suffering from Parkinson's Syndrome , at the place of his birth.

Saupe received various prizes and honors for his work, including a. the Nernst Prize of the German Bunsen Society (1974), the Humboldt Prize (1987, guest at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research ), and an invitation to the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1998).

The Alfred Saupe Prize of the German Liquid Crystal Society in the Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry, which has been awarded since 2010, is named after him.

literature

• Patricia E. Cladis, Peter Palffy-Muhoray, Alfred Saupe (editors): Dynamics and Defects in Liquid Crystals: A Festschrift in Honor of Alfred Saupe , CRC Press, 1998

Web links

• Literature by and about Alfred Saupe in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary of the German Liquid Crystal Society (PDF file; 464 kB)