Hans Hellmann (physicist)

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Hans Gustav Adolf Hellmann (born October 14, 1903 in Wilhelmshaven , † May 29, 1938 in Moscow ) was a German physicist . In 1937 he wrote one of the first textbooks on quantum chemistry .

Life

Hellmann was born in 1903 in Wilhelmshaven, the first of two children of naval officer Gustav Hellmann and his wife Hermine. When his father died prematurely, the mother improved her pension by offering workers lunch in her own home. The young Hellmann earned his pocket money as a tour guide.

In 1922 he began studying electrical engineering at the Technical University of Stuttgart , but switched to technical physics after just one semester . He financed his studies by temporarily working in the port of his hometown. In 1925 he wrote a thesis on the dielectric constants of salt solutions at the University of Kiel . He was able to experimentally confirm the predictions of the current theory by Peter Debye , Erich Hückel , Lars Onsager and Hans Falkenhagen . In Kiel he also attended the lectures of Walther Kossel and probably came into contact with electronic valence theory for the first time. After seven more semesters in Stuttgart, Hellmann completed his diploma thesis on radioactive preparations with Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin . He then became an assistant to Erich Regener in Stuttgart, where he was awarded a Dr. Ing. PhD.

In January 1929 Hellmann married Regener's foster daughter Viktoria Bernstein, who came from a Jewish family from Ukraine . She came to Stuttgart as a distant relative of Regener's wife after the death of her parents from the Soviet Union . Hans Hellmann Jr. was born on October 14, 1929.

In 1929 Hellmann became an assistant for theoretical physics at the Technical University of Hanover . During this very fertile time he dealt with the nature of chemical bonds and with molecular properties from the point of view of quantum chemistry. From 1933 onwards, under the National Socialists , he ran into increasing difficulties because his wife was Jewish. His habilitation application was rejected by the Prussian Ministry of Culture in autumn 1933. At the end of 1933, he was also dismissed on March 31, 1934. Hellmann decided to emigrate. Although he also had good contacts in the USA , he decided on the Soviet Union because of his wife's origins, but also because of his political convictions.

In 1934 he got a position at the prestigious Karpov Institute for Physical Chemistry in Moscow . Here he wrote his textbook on quantum chemistry. During the Great Terror he was arrested on March 8, 1938 as part of the German operation of the NKVD and accused of espionage for Germany. Hans Hellmann was executed on May 29, 1938. On October 11, 1957, he was rehabilitated.

The GA Hellmann Prize of the Working Group for Theoretical Chemistry of the Bunsen Society has been awarded annually to younger young scientists since 1998 for outstanding scientific achievements in the field of theoretical chemistry.

Hellmann introduced pseudopotentials in 1934 . The Hellmann-Feynman theorem , which Hellmann published in his textbook on quantum chemistry, is named after him and Richard Feynman .

Works

  • Hans Hellmann: About the appearance of ions during the decay of ozone and the ionization of the stratosphere , Ann. d. Phys. 2 (1929) 708-732 (diss.).
  • Hans Hellmann: Квантовая Химия , ONTI, Moscow and Leningrad 1937 (German introduction to quantum chemistry . Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna 1937; new edition with biographical notes by Hans Hellmann junior, Springer Spektrum 2015, ISBN 978-3-662-45966-9 ).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Alexander Vatlin : "What a devil pack": The German operation of the NKVD in Moscow and in the Moscow area 1936 to 1941. Metropol, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86331-090-5 , p. 308
  2. Entry in the list of victims of the Stalinist terror on listmemo.ru , (accessed on March 18, 2013)