Henry Barschall

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Henry Herman "Heinz" Barschall (* as Heinrich Hermann Barschall April 29, 1915 in Berlin ; † February 4, 1997 in Madison , Wisconsin ) was an American experimental physicist of German descent who dealt with nuclear physics.

Barschall was the son of a patent attorney, was baptized Protestant like his father, but had Jewish grandparents. In 1934 Barschall began his studies in Berlin, but in 1936 could not be a supervisor for a thesis there, i.e. H. Promotion, find more. On the advice of Max Planck , he went to Marburg to Grüneisen , who accepted him straight away at the physics institute there and transferred a thesis. Nevertheless, he decided to emigrate to the USA in 1937. In 1940 he received his doctorate under Rudolf Ladenburg at Princeton University on the interaction of fast neutrons with helium. Shortly after Niels Bohr had reported the discovery of nuclear fission in lectures in the USA, he carried out experiments in the USA (like many other groups). In a work in Physical Review (vol. 58, 1940, p. 682) with John Archibald Wheeler he reported on the discovery of spin-orbit coupling in neutron scattering on helium nuclei. In 1940 he was an instructor at Princeton and from 1941 to 1943 at the University of Kansas . During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project from 1943 to 1946 . From 1946 he worked at the University of Wisconsin – Madison , where he became a professor of physics. Among other things, he determined cross-sections for fast neutrons.

After his laboratory was destroyed in a terrorist attack in 1970, with one dead and several injured (including one of his students), he turned to the use of neutrons in materials research and medicine (and then went to the faculty of Medical physics and nuclear technology), especially in cancer therapy. From 1971 to 1973 he worked temporarily at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory . In 1986 he retired from the University of Wisconsin.

He had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1972 , whose physics department he headed from 1980 to 1983. From 1983 to 1988 he served on the governing board of the American Institute of Physics and from 1983 to 1986 on the board of the American Physical Society. In 1987 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

An article by Barschall in Physics Today (July 1988) on the (high) costs of physics journals from commercial publishers led to a lawsuit from the negatively mentioned publisher Gordon and Breach, from which Barschall ultimately emerged victorious.

From 1972 to 1987 he was editor of Physical Review C. In 1965 he received the first Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics .

He had 41 PhD students, including Robert K. Adair .

Fonts

  • Barschall Reminiscences , Physics in Perspective, Vol. 1, 1999, pp. 390-444

Web links

References

  1. ^ Henry H. Barschall papers - Collections Search - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In: collections.ushmm.org. Retrieved November 29, 2016 .
  2. ↑ a b Barschall, HH, Reminiscences , Physics in Perspective, Vol. 1, 1999, pp. 390-444, doi : 10.1007 / s000160050030 .
  3. ↑ The attack destroyed the Sterling Hall and was directed against the US Army Math Research Center located there during the protests against the Vietnam War
personal data
SURNAME Barschall, Henry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Barschall, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 29, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 4, 1997
Place of death Madison (Wisconsin)