Homi Jehangir Bhabha

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Homi Jehangir Bhabha

Homi Jehangir Bhabha ( Gujarati હોમિ ભાભા , Hindi होमी जहांगीर भाभा ; born October 30, 1909 in Bombay ; † January 24, 1966 at the Glacier des Bossons near Chamonix ) was an Indian physicist of Parsian descent. His main focus was elementary particle physics . In 1955 he headed the Geneva nuclear conference as president . He also chaired the Indian Atomic Energy Commission.

life and work

Bhabha went to school in Bombay, including Elphinstone College . He studied from 1927 at Cambridge University ( Caius College ). He was originally supposed to become an engineer and then join his uncle Dorabji (Dorab) Tata's steel factory ( Tata Iron and Steel Company in Jamshedpur , part of what would later become the Tata Group ). He passed the exams in technical mechanics, but then turned to theoretical physics, where he studied with Paul Dirac , among others . In 1932 he passed the Tripos exams with top marks and, as a Rouse Ball scholar, visited Wolfgang Pauli in Zurich, Enrico Fermi in Rome and Hendrik Anthony Kramers in Utrecht. In 1933 his first publication (on cosmic rays ) took place in the Zeitschrift für Physik , he won the Isaac Newton Fellowship and in 1935 he received his doctorate from Ralph Fowler in Cambridge. In the same year he published an article on electron-positron scattering in the Proceedings of the Royal Society ( Bhabha scattering ). During this time he was also frequently in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr . In 1936 an essay with Walter Heitler followed on the cascade theory of cosmic radiation (with successive processes of bremsstrahlung with electron-positron pair generation, pair annihilation with gamma ray formation, etc.). In 1937 he won the "1851 Exhibition" grant.

In 1939 he returned to India for a visit, which was however extended due to the outbreak of World War II. He became a lecturer (reader) at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (headed by CV Raman ) and built up a research group there on cosmic radiation, including Harish-Chandra . In 1945 he founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay together with JRD Tata and with funds from the Tata Foundation of his uncle, who died in 1932 (with whose money the Indian Institute of Science was founded). At the same time, after Indian independence, at the behest of Jawaharlal Nehru (who was friends with Bhabha) in 1948 he became head of the newly founded Indian Atomic Energy Commission. Bhabha was aware of the use of nuclear energy at an early stage and assumed from the lack of publications on nuclear fission (the discovery of which was made known on his journey home to India) during the Second World War that it was being researched in secret in the industrialized countries. In collaboration with Nehru, he pushed India's own participation in nuclear research as early as the mid-1940s and then remained the leading figure in this field in India even under his successors. He represented India in the international atomic energy bodies ( IAEA ) and also in 1955 at the Geneva conference on the use of nuclear energy. Bhabha was a scientific advisor to the Indian government and also founded the Indian National Committee for Space Research with Vikram Sarabhai . In 1954 he founded the Atomic Energy Establishment (AEET) in Trombay , where the Indian atomic bomb was later developed, and became the secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), newly founded in 1954, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. Many of the scientists in the later Indian atomic bomb program were selected directly by Bhabha ( Homi Nusserwanji Sethna , PK Iyenagar, Vasudev Iya, Raja Ramanna). Thanks to his personal contacts with Wilfrid Bennett Lewis in Canada, a first nuclear reactor ( Cirus ) was installed at the AEET .

Homi Jehangir Bhabha died in 1966 when Air India Flight 101 crashed on Mont Blanc . He was on his way to Vienna for an IAEA meeting via Geneva, where the plane was supposed to stop.

Bhabha scattering , named after this physicist, is a quantum mechanical elementary particle scattering similar to Møller scattering , with an electron and a positron interacting here. This process is used in particle accelerators such as the LEP as a monitor reaction: the differential cross-section is greatest at small angles, so that the luminosity of the accelerator can be monitored with a counter near the beam pipe .

In 1941 Bhabha became a member ("Fellow") of the Royal Society . In 1954 he received the Padma Bhushan Prize. In 1957 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1958 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1983 to the National Academy of Sciences .

In his honor, has on 12 January 1967, the then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi , the Atomic Energy Establishment at Bhabha Atomic Research Center renamed (BARC). A moon crater is also named after Bhabha.

In his free time he was busy with painting and botany. He loved classical music and operas. He is related to Homi K. Bhabha .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ More precisely, Tata was the husband of his father's sister. Bhabha's father was the Inspector General of Education for Mysore .
  2. ↑ HJ Bhabha: On the absorption of cosmic radiation . In: Journal of Physics . tape 86 , no. 1-2 , January 1933, pp. 120-130 , doi : 10.1007 / BF01340188 .
  3. ^ HJ Bhabha: The Scattering of Positrons by Electrons with Exchange on Dirac's Theory of the Positron . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society A . tape 154 , no. 881 , March 1936, p. 195–206 , doi : 10.1098 / rspa.1936.0046 ( royalsocietypublishing.org [PDF]).
  4. ↑ They knew each other from their joint ship voyage from England in 1939.
  5. ^ Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed October 9, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Bhabha, Homi Jehangir
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Bombay , India
DATE OF DEATH January 24, 1966
Place of death Bossons Glacier