Erich Peter Wohlfarth

Erich Peter Wohlfarth (born December 7, 1924 in Gleiwitz , † March 16, 1988 in London ) was a German-British physicist who studied magnetism .

Career

Wohlfarth was the son of a Court of Appeal Council in Wroclaw , in 1933 due to the takeover of the Nazis went with his family to England and political persecution. Wohlfarth studied physics at the University of Leeds with a bachelor's degree in 1946 and a doctorate in 1948 ( Ph.D. ) with Edmund Clifton Stoner . From 1948 he taught at Imperial College London as a lecturer in mathematics, from 1956 as a reader for applied mathematics and from 1964 as a professor for the theory of magnetism.

He was visiting professor at the Iowa State University (1966), at the University of Grenoble (1973/74), at the Ruhr University Bochum (1978) and the TU Vienna (1978/79) as well as visiting scientist at the Research Center of General Electric in Schenectady ( 1979).

Wohlfarth applied the Stoner model of ferromagnetism from his teacher Stoner (from 1938/39). In Germany it is therefore sometimes named after both of them. The Stoner-Wohlfarth model (1948) must be distinguished from this, it deals with the magnetism of an ensemble or individual specimens of randomly oriented ferromagnetic single-domain nanocrystals .

He applied the Stoner model to ferromagnetic alloys (Rhodes-Wohlfarth plot), to weak and heterogeneous band ferromagnets and dealt with magnetic materials and materials and various application questions of ferromagnets, with spin waves and with the properties of small magnets.

In 1957 he received a D. Sc. at Leeds University . In 1988 he received an honorary doctorate from the Vienna University of Technology . He was a fellow of the Institute of Physics and the IEEE . He was the founder and first chairman of the Magnetism Sections at the Institute of Physics and the European Physical Society .

Fonts

• Editor: Ferromagnetic materials. A handbook on the properties of magnetically ordered substances. North Holland 1980 to 1990 (later as Handbook of Magnetic Materials)
• with Stoner: A mechanism of magnetic hysteresis in heterogeneous alloys. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Physical, Mathematical and Engineering Sciences. Volume 240, 1948, pp. 599-642 (Stoner-Wohlfarth model).

literature

• E. Kneller, S. Methfessel, D. Wagner: Obituary for Erich Peter Wohlfarth. In: Physical sheets . Volume 44, No. 6, 1988, p. 178, doi: 10.1002 / phbl.19880440613

Individual evidence

1. ↑ TU Wien: Honorary doctorates ( memento of the original from February 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved March 26, 2015.