Horst Korsching

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Horst Korsching (born August 12, 1912 in Danzig ; † March 21, 1998 in Hildesheim ) was a German physicist and one of the German nuclear physicists interned in Farm Hall .

Life

Horst Korsching attended school in Danzig and Berlin . After graduating from high school in 1932, he studied physics at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In 1938 he received his doctorate under Hermann Schüler at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics ; the oral examination of his dissertation quadrupole moment of 83/36 Kr, 131/54 Xe and mechanical moment of 83/36 Kr took place on October 3, 1938 in the Berlin University.

Korsching was a colleague of Karl Wirtz at this institute and researched the laws of the magnetic moments of atomic nuclei and thermal diffusion . At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute he was one of Peter Debye's former assistants . During the war years he worked on uranium enrichment under the overall direction of Kurt Diebner and Werner Heisenberg . In 1943 Korsching and the staff of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute moved to Hechingen to flee the bombing raids. There he built his devices for isotope separation by thermal diffusion, as did Erich Bagge , who had developed a similar device (isotope lock). Two years later, in 1945, he was arrested by the Allied Forces of the United Kingdom and the United States for six months under Operation Epsilon as one of ten nuclear physicists.

In judging his guards at Farm Hall, he was a complete mystery . After the success of the Allies in the field of atomic bombs became known, he criticized the German leadership of the former German uranium project , which caused Walther Gerlach to burst into anger.

In 1946 he became an employee of the Max Planck Institute for Physics , which was located in the British occupation zone and opened in Göttingen . In 1958 he moved with the institute to Munich . There he developed a method for measuring thermal diffusion and diffusion coefficients in liquids and examined the dependence of the processes involved on the shape of the molecule.

Web links

literature

  • Dieter Hoffmann (Ed.): Operation Epsilon. The Farm Hall Protocols or The Allies' Fear of the German Atomic Bomb. Rowohlt, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-87134-082-0 (German reverse translation of Wilfried Sczepan's protocols).
  • Richard von Schirach: The night of the physicists. Heisenberg, Hahn, Weizsäcker and the German bomb. Berenberg, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-937834-54-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Helmut Rechenberg: Siegfried Flügge and Horst Korsching and the uranium association . In: Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau . tape 51 , 1998, pp. 312 .
  2. ↑ Printed in: Zeitschrift für Physik, Volume 109, Issue 5/6, pp. 349–357. See catalog [1] .
  3. ^ Rechenberg: Werner Heisenberg and the KWI for Physics. In: Physical sheets. 1981, issue 12.
  4. ↑ D. Hoffmann: Farm Hall tapes: Operation Epsilon: The secret service files about the internment of the German nuclear physicists in the English Farm Hall are open . In: Physical sheets . tape 48 , no. December 12 , 1992, pp. 989–993 , doi : 10.1002 / phbl.19920481205 (with photo by Korsching).
  5. ^ W. Rollwagen: Physics in Munich today . In: Physical sheets . tape 22 , no. 9 , September 1966, p. 397-413 , doi : 10.1002 / phbl.19660220903 .
personal data
SURNAME Korsching, Horst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH August 12, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Danzig
DATE OF DEATH March 21, 1998
Place of death Hildesheim