Gregory Broad

Gregory Broad.

Gregory Breit (born July 14, 1899 in Nikolajew , Cherson Governorate , Russian Empire , (now Ukraine ); † September 11, 1981 in Salem (Oregon) ) was an American physicist who dealt with nuclear physics.

Breit studied at Johns Hopkins University (Bachelor 1920), where he received his doctorate in 1921. In 1921/22 he was a National Research Fellow at the University of Leiden (with Paul Ehrenfest ) and then at Harvard University . In 1923 he became an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota and was from 1924 to 1929 at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC in the department of geomagnetism. In 1928 he was at the ETH Zurich . In 1929 he became a professor at New York University , in 1934 at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and in 1947 at Yale University (from 1958 as Donner Professor of Physics ). From 1968 he was a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo , where he retired in 1974.

In 1935/36 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study . In 1940/41 he was at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory of the US Navy. During World War II he was in the Manhattan Project , where Arthur Holly Compton had initially chosen him as a director. Breit gave up this position in 1942, and was succeeded by Robert Oppenheimer . He was at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago as the coordinator of the Fast Neutrons project and from 1943 to 1945 chief physicist at the Aberdeen Proving Ground , the US Army's ballistics laboratory .

From 1939 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , in 1951 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1964 he received the Franklin Medal and in 1967 the National Medal of Science . In 1969 he received the Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics .

He was Associate Editor of Physical Review from 1927 to 1929, 1939 to 1941, 1954 to 1956, and 1961 to 1963 .

In the 1930s he worked with Eugene Wigner on resonances, among others . The Breit-Wigner formula is named after both (Breit, Wigner Capture of Slow Neutrons , Physical Review Vol. 49, 1936, p. 519). The Breit system is also named after him . Along with John Archibald Wheeler examined the process of electron - positron - pair production in the collision of two photons ( Breit-Wheeler process ).

Web links

• Mcallister Hull: Gregory Breit (1899-1981). A Biographical Memoir. (PDF, 160 kB) National Academy of Sciences, 1998 (English). 
• Gregory Broad. Biography. In: Physics History Network. AIP(English). 

Individual evidence

1. ^ G. Breit and John A. Wheeler: Collision of Two Light Quanta . In: Phys. Rev. Band 46 , 1934, pp. 1087 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRev.46.1087 (English).