Fritz Bernhard (physicist)

Fritz Bernhard (born December 14, 1913 in Görlitz , † April 8, 1993 in Berlin ) was a German physicist. He was temporarily dean of the mathematics and natural sciences faculty at the Humboldt University in Berlin .

Life

Bernhard was born in Görlitz in December 1913 and grew up with his brother with his mother. At a secondary school , which he initially attended, he stayed in the Obersekunda . Then he switched to an upper secondary school . After having passed the Abitur , he began teaching mathematics, physics and biology at the University of Leipzig in 1933 . In 1936 he moved to the Technical University in Berlin-Charlottenburg. There he graduated from Hans Geiger in 1939 and was Wilhelm Westphal's assistant from 1938 to 1942 . In Geiger's laboratory he succeeded in building an accelerator for what was then known as the “shattering of atoms” (nuclear and particle physics). Because of a heart defect, Bernhard was written unfit for war. This allowed him to continue working in experimental physics at Geiger .

From 1942 Bernhard worked at Manfred von Ardenne's institute in Berlin-Lichterfelde . He was involved in building a 1 megavolt Van de Graaff accelerator and the prototype of a magnetic isotope separation system for uranium isotopes, a type of mass spectrometer similar to the calutrons in the USA. As part of the uranium project , the construction of a cyclotron and an isotope separation system for the Reich Ministry of Post in Miersdorf, which later became the Miersdorf Institute, began . At the end of the war in 1945, von Ardenne, Peter Adolf Thiessen and Gustav Hertz agreed to put their scientific work in the service of the Soviet Union . In this context, the Lichterfeld Institute was completely dismantled and rebuilt as Institute A in Sinop near Sukhumi . For Bernhard, who had meanwhile become a father of four, the question of his professional future arose.

Since the Soviet offer promised a continuation of his scientific work under very favorable conditions for the time, Bernhard and his family flew to Sukhumi with other institute employees on June 13, 1945. There he worked as one of Ardennes' deputies. The institute initially dealt primarily with isotope separation. This carried out important groundwork for the construction of the Soviet atomic bomb . During his ten-year stay on the Black Sea coast, Bernhard also developed a detector to detect radioactive radiation.

Bernhard in 1956 after his return to the Humboldt University in Robert Rompe Dr. rer. nat. PhD; the title of his doctoral thesis is A new high-intensity mass spectrometer for the detection of atomic or molecular beams.

Between 1955 and 1961 Bernhard worked as deputy director at the Nuclear Physics Institute of the German Academy of Sciences (DAW) in Miersdorf near Berlin under the director Gustav Richter , who had also worked for Gustav Hertz in the Soviet Union, but was mainly a theorist. Bernhard was responsible for large-scale systems at the Institute. There were teething problems: an ordered cascade accelerator was not finished until 1960 and a planned Van de Graaff accelerator did not materialize.

Due to the construction of the Berlin Wall, there was a lack of professors at the Humboldt University. Therefore, Bernhard was appointed full professor for experimental physics in Berlin in 1961. From 1964 until his retirement in 1979, he also headed the mathematics and natural sciences faculty of the Humboldt University as dean.

As a university lecturer, Bernhard also tried to popularize physics among the population outside of the university. He worked for the Urania - Society for the Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge and was one of the initiators of the scientific television program Aha .

Honors

• 1958 National Prize of the GDR III. Science and technology class
• 1975 Honored university lecturer in the GDR

swell

• Portrait in the Berliner Zeitung on September 9, 1989 p. 9.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Stange: Institute X. The beginnings of nuclear and high-energy physics in the GDR. Vieweg / Teubner, 2001, p. 142.
2. ^ Karlsch: Hitler's bomb. DVA, 2005, p. 126.
3. ^ List of the award winners of Honored University Lecturers of the GDR 1975 to 1989 , German Society for Order Studies.