Heinz London

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Heinz London (born November 7, 1907 in Bonn , † August 3, 1970 in Oxford ) was a German-British physicist .

Heinz London came from a wealthy, upper-class German-Jewish family. His father Franz London was a professor of mathematics at the University of Bonn and his mother Luise, b. Hamburger came from a family of textile entrepreneurs. The father died of a heart condition when Heinz was 9 years old. Heinz grew up under the strong influence of his brother Fritz, who was 7 years older than him . The two brothers stayed in close contact throughout their lives, even when Fritz lived in America and Heinz in England. Heinz studied at the University of Bonn from 1926 to 1927, after which he completed an industrial internship for six months at the chemical factory WC Heraeus in Hanau, followed by years of study at the Technical University of Berlin-Charlottenburg (now the Technical University of Berlin ) until 1929 and the University of Munich until 1931. From 1931 he worked in Breslau in the group of Franz Eugen Simon , who had specialized in the investigation of superconductivity . After the seizure of power , he was forced to emigrate because a further academic career in Germany was no longer possible. After completing his doctoral thesis in Breslau in 1934, he moved to Oxford, where his brother Fritz and Eugen Simon and some of his colleagues at the Clarendon Laboratory had already found a new place of work. Oxford became the first center for low temperature physics in the UK. From 1936 Heinz worked at the H. H. Wills Laboratory in Bristol, while his brother Fritz first went to the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris and later to the University of Durham / New Jersey . After the outbreak of war, Heinz London was interned for some time on the Isle of Man as an " enemy alien " in 1940, but was then released to work on the British nuclear program. He received British citizenship in 1942.

Together with his brother Fritz London, Heinz London developed a phenomenological interpretation of superconductivity, which, with the help of quantum mechanics, contributed to a better understanding of chemical observations.

He came up with the idea of 3 He- 4 He mixed cooling (dilution refrigerator) to achieve low temperatures, first used at the Kamerlingh-Onnes laboratory in Leiden in 1964.

In 1961 he became a member ( Fellow ) of the Royal Society . Heinz London, who had been a heavy smoker all his life, died of bronchial carcinoma in 1970.

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SURNAME London, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH 3rd August 1970
Place of death Oxford