Herman Feshbach

Herman Feshbach (born February 2, 1917 in New York City , † December 22, 2000 in Cambridge , USA ) was an American theoretical physicist . He is known for his pioneering work in the field of nuclear physics .

Feshbach studied at the City College of New York (where Julian Schwinger was his classmate, with whom he remained lifelong friends) in New York (bachelor's degree in 1937) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he became an instructor in 1941 and received his doctorate in 1942 under Philip Morse . From 1945 he was assistant professor there, from 1947 associate professor and from 1955 professor. From 1967 to 1973 he headed the Center for Theoretical Physics there and was head of the physics faculty from 1973 to 1983. In 1983 he became an institute professor. In 1987 he retired.

He was active in the understanding between US scientists and Soviet scientists and stood up for Andrei Sakharov , whom he visited after his return from exile in Gorky . He was also active in nuclear disarmament issues and was a co-founder and first chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists . In 1969 he co-signed a protest note against military research at MIT.

Feshbach was one of the leading authorities on the theory of nuclear structure and reactions and authored several well-known textbooks. In 1958 he developed a general theory for nuclear reactions based on the projection of a nuclear state onto direct and indirect channels. These methods are still the backbone of calculations on nuclear reactions today. A special application of his theory are the Feshbach resonances named after him , which play a major role in the theory of the Bose-Einstein condensation . He often worked with Victor Weisskopf at MIT, for example in the development of the optical model of nuclear reactions, initially for the description of the scattering of neutrons on nuclei. Many other concepts in the theory of nuclear reactions come from Feshbach.

With his teacher Morse he wrote an extensive book on mathematical methods of theoretical physics in two volumes, which he edited again until his death. With Morse, he also founded the Annals of Physics in 1957 for longer review articles for which there was no longer any space in the increasingly extensive Physical Review.

He has received various awards, including the National Medal of Science in 1986 and the Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics from the American Physical Society in 1973. In 1949 he was made a Fellow of the American Physical Society . He had been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1954 , which he directed from 1982 to 1986. He headed the physics department of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was President of the American Physical Society in 1980/81. Since 1969 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences . The annual Feshbach Lectures (since 1984) and a professorship (since 1999) are named after him at MIT. Feshbach was a consultant to several large US research laboratories ( Argonne National Laboratory , Brookhaven National Laboratory , Los Alamos National Laboratory , Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ).

He was married with a daughter and two sons.

In his honor, the APS named the Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics , which has been awarded annually since 2014 .

Fonts

• Feshbach, Amos de Shalit : Theoretical nuclear physics, Vol. 1 (Nuclear Structure), Wiley 1974
• Feshbach Theoretical Nuclear Physics , Vol. 2 (Nuclear Reactions), Wiley 1992
• with Philip Morse : Methods of theoretical physics , 2 volumes, McGraw Hill 1953, 1999
• with Léon Van Hove , de Shalit (editor): Preludes in theoretical physics. Essays in honor of VF Weisskopf , North Holland 1966

literature

• web.mit.edu/newsoffice - MIT obituary
• Feshbach, Obituary, Physics Today, October 2001, pdf
• Biography at the APS

Individual evidence

1. ^ Feshbach, Charles Porter, Weisskopf Model for nuclear reactions with neutrons , Physical Review Vol. 96, 1954, pp. 448-464
2. ↑ APS Jellow Archive , accessed October 1, 2017.