Jürgen Meyer-ter-Vehn

Jürgen Meyer-ter-Vehn (born February 16, 1940 in Berlin ) is a German theoretical physicist who deals with laser-plasma interaction at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics .

Until 1973 he published under the name Meyer.

life and work

Meyer-ter-Vehn studied physics from 1959 as a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation at the University of Münster and at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he obtained his diploma in 1966. In 1969 he received his doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics from the Technical University of Munich . He conducted research at the Technical University of Munich, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , the Paul Scherrer Institute and the Research Center Jülich . In 1976 he completed his habilitation at the Technical University of Munich, where he has been an adjunct professor since 1997. From 1979 he was in the laser research group of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Munich, from which the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics emerged in 1981. There he was group leader for laser plasma theory until 2005 .

Until the late 1970s, he was mainly concerned with theoretical nuclear physics.

Meyer-ter-Vehn investigated the physical principles of inertial fusion with lasers and heavy ion beams. In the 2000s he dealt with relativistic laser-plasma interaction (where, for example, due to the relativistic increase in mass, new effects occur, they induced transparency and self-focusing with channel formation) and with the formation of plasma blocks by ultra-short terawatt laser pulses for laser fusion (almost ignition) . He also developed the concept of wake field accelerators for the generation of extremely high electric fields by laser-induced charge separation in the plasma by John M. Dawson (a possible accelerator concept).

In 1997 he received the Edward Teller Award from the American Nuclear Society . In 2009 he received the Hannes Alfvén Prize of the European Physical Society. The laudation honored his outstanding theoretical work in the fields of inertial fusion, laser-matter interaction, in particular the relativistic laser-plasma interaction and the "laser wake field acceleration" .

He was married to Helga Meyer-ter-Vehn (d. 2011) and has two sons, Tobias Meyer-ter-Vehn and Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn.

Fonts

• with Stefano Atzeni: The physics of inertial fusion. Beam plasma interaction, hydrodynamics, hot dense matter (= International Series of Monographs on Physics. Vol. 125). Clarendon Press, Oxford et al. 2004, ISBN 0-19-856264-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Jürgen Meyer-ter-Vehn in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage at the MPI
• Hannes Alfvén Prize to Meyer-ter-Vehn