Immanuel Estermann

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Immanuel Estermann (born March 31, 1900 in Berlin ; † March 30, 1973 in Haifa ) was a nuclear physicist.

Life

Estermann grew up partly in Jerusalem, where his father had moved with the family as an active Zionist. With the outbreak of the First World War, the family returned to Germany. He studied physical chemistry in Hamburg, received his doctorate there in 1921 under Max Vollmer and was a lecturer from 1922. When the National Socialists came to power, he lost his post as a Jew at the University of Hamburg. In 1933 he emigrated via England to the USA to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (like his former boss Otto Stern ), where he became an associate professor and a professor after the Second World War. In 1941 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . From 1943 to 1945 Estermann was involved in the Manhattan Project , the construction of the American atomic bomb . In 1951 he went to the Office of Naval Research, initially as a consultant and head of the materials science department, and from 1959 as its scientific director in London . In 1964 he retired. He went to Israel, where he became Lidow Professor of Solid State Physics at the Technion . Estermann died in Haifa in 1973.

Estermann is known for developing the molecular beam method together with Otto Stern , with whom he worked closely in Hamburg from the early 1920s. Together they showed with this method that not only elementary particles like electrons had wave properties (previously shown by Davisson and Germer), but also molecules like the hydrogen atom and helium. With Stern he also measured the magnetic moment of the proton in 1931.

Immanuel Estermann is the brother of the mathematician Theodor Estermann . His daughter Hannah was a professor of Spanish and his daughter Eva of botany.

Fonts

  • (Ed.): Methods of Experimental Physics. Volume 1: Classical methods. Academic Press 1959.
  • (Ed.): Recent researches in molecular beams - a collection of papers dedicated to Otto Stern on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Academic Press 1959.
  • with DR Bates (Ed.): Advances in Atomic and Molecular Physics. Volume 1 to 8. 1965 to 1973.
  • History of molecular beam research: personal reminiscences of the important evolutionary period 1919-1933. In: American Journal of Physics. Volume 43, 1975, p. 661.

literature

  • Kaznelson , 1962
  • Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 272.
  • Walter Tetzlaff: 2000 short biographies of important German Jews of the 20th century. Askania, Lindhorst 1982, ISBN 3-921730-10-4 .

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ Estermanns biography of Otto Stern ( Memento from March 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ). He accompanied Stern to Rostock and then to Hamburg
  2. ^ Estermann, Stern in Zeitschrift für Physik. Volume 61, 1930, p. 95
  3. ^ Estermann, I. Frisch, Stern in Zeitschrift für Physik. Volume 73, 1931, p. 348
personal data
SURNAME Estermann, Immanuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Nuclear physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 30, 1973
Place of death Haifa