Felix Boehm (physicist)

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Felix Hans Boehm (born June 9, 1924 in Basel ; † May 25, 2021 ) was a Swiss - American experimental physicist who dealt with nuclear physics , weak interaction and neutrino physics.

Career

Boehm studied physics at the University of Geneva and the ETH Zurich , where 1948 he his diploma took off and in 1951 received his doctorate . In 1952 he went to Columbia University as a Boese Fellow with CS Wu and in 1953 at Caltech with Jesse DuMond and Charles Lauritsen . In 1958 he became an assistant professor and in 1961 a professor at Caltech. In 1961 he became a Sloan Research Fellow . In 1957/58 he was visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg (at the invitation of Jensen ), in 1965/66 at theUniversity of Copenhagen , was at CERN in 1971/72 , at the Laue Langevin Institute in Grenoble in 1979/80 , at the Paul Scherrer Institute , in 1980 at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and in 1981 at the ETH Zurich (a previous professorship at the He had knocked out ETH in favor of Caltech). From 1995 he was professor emeritus at Caltech .

Research priorities

In the 1950s, he was primarily concerned with experiments on parity violation , the violation of which had first been confirmed experimentally by CS Wu , which Boehm and Aaldert Wapstra in 1956 again confirmed (by measuring the circular polarization of the gamma rays in beta decay). He also came into contact with theorists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann . Later he dealt with X-ray spectroscopy in nuclear physics (isotope shift of K-shell electrons, later muons at CERN and at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (LAMPF) in Los Alamos), with neutrino physics (like the search in vain in the 1980s after neutrino oscillations at the Paul Scherrer Institute) and experiments on double beta decay , which were carried out in the Gotthard tunnel , among other places . He also searched in vain for violations of time-reversal invariance in nuclear physics (but found upper bounds with his group). In 1970 he found parity violations in nuclear physics (observable as circular polarization in gamma decays of unpolarized nuclei). Since 1970 he has been working with the theoretician Petr Vogel from Caltech.

Honors

From 1983 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences . In 1995 he received the Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics . In 1980 he won the Humboldt Research Award . In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

miscellaneous

In 1960 Boehm succeeded in bringing the future Nobel Prize winner Rudolf Mößbauer to the California Institute of Technology.

Fonts

  • Felix Boehm, Petr Vogel: Physics of massive neutrinos , Cambridge University Press 1987, 1992.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Perkins: Felix H. Boehm, 1924-2021. California Institute of Technology, May 26, 2021, accessed June 2, 2021 .
  2. ↑ Vanderleeden, Boehm Experiments on parity non conservation in nuclear forces 1 , Physical Review Vol. 2, 1970, p. 748
  3. ^ Fellows of the AAAS: Felix Boehm. American Association for the Advancement of Science, accessed February 13, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Boehm, Felix
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Boehm, Felix Hans (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION Swiss physicist
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 2021