Jean Thibaud

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Jean Thibaud (born May 12, 1901 in Lyon , † May 1960 ibid) was a French physicist. He was a professor at the University of Lyon .

Thibaud was an electrical engineer and received his doctorate in 1924 from Maurice de Broglie in Paris. In Paris he was director of the Laboratory for X-rays (Laboratoire de physique des rayons X) and was considered an internationally respected expert in X-rays. From 1933 he went back to Lyon, as he was more of an outsider in Paris. Frédéric Joliot-Curie was suspicious of his results and after the war, Joliot-Curie seems to have prevented Thibaud from being appointed High Commissioner for Atomic Energy in 1950, with a plagiarism affair playing a role. In 1940 he was a professor in Lyon (Faculté des Sciences). In 1935/36 he was the founder and director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Physics (IPNL, Institut de physique nucléaire de Lyon), the first such institute in France outside Paris. After the war he received 20 million francs from the French state to build a Van de Graaff generator in a fort near Lyon. He was able to use this in exchange for the nuclear training of technicians and officers in the French army.

Thibaud developed a cyclotron before Ernest Orlando Lawrence in Paris in 1930 . At that time he was working in Maurice de Broglie's private laboratory in Paris. At first he built a linear accelerator for protons (inspired by an article by Rolf Wideröe from 1929), but in doing so came up against technical limits that were difficult to manage at the time and then turned to the idea of ​​a cyclotron, which he developed independently. His doctoral supervisor de Broglie presented his results in 1933 at the Solvay Congress and he published it in 1932 in the reports of the International Congress of Electrical Engineers. Thibaud reports that it received a clear response as early as November 1930, before Lawrence in Berkeley. Thibaud later made no priority claims.

In 1933 he experimentally confirmed the annihilation of electron and positron . The latter was only discovered in 1930 by Carl David Anderson . Thibaud also measured the electrical charge of the positron beforehand.

In the late 1930s, he turned to nuclear fission of uranium with neutrons. He worked with André Moussa (1915–1996), who later became a physics professor in Lyon .

He wrote popular science books on nuclear and atomic physics and technology and a book on X-rays.

He was a member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts in Lyon (Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon) and was its president in 1947.

A prize for young scientists in elementary particle and nuclear physics is named after him in Lyon.

Fonts

  • Les rayons X, Paris: A. Colin 1930, 2nd edition 1934, 5th edition 1960
  • Vie et transmutations des atomes, Paris: A. Michel 1938
  • Energie atomique et univers, Lyon 1946, 4th edition 1952
  • Puissance de l'atome: de l'utilisation industrial et du contrôle de l'énergie atomique au gouvernement mondial, Paris: A. Michel 1949

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Information on Jean Thibaud in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France .
  2. ↑ This partly also reflected disagreements between de Broglie and other French physicists, in addition to Joliot-Curie, Paul Langevin , Marie Curie and Francis Perrin .
  3. ^ Jean-Paul Martin, Pascal Bellanca-Plenel, Jean Thibaud (1901–1960): un atomiste du XX siècle, Acad. Sci. Lyon 2014
  4. ↑ It was previously called the Laboratory for Atomic Physics
  5. Jump up ↑ JL Heilbron, Robert Seidel, Lawrence and his Laboratory, University of California Press, 1990, p. 80
personal data
SURNAME Thibaud, Jean
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 12, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Lyon
DATE OF DEATH May 1960
Place of death Lyon