John P. Schiffer

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John Paul Schiffer (born November 22, 1930 in Budapest ) is a Hungarian-American former experimental nuclear physicist.

Schiffer first went to high school in Budapest and emigrated to the USA in 1947. In 1951 he received his bachelor's degree in physics from Oberlin College , in 1952 his master's degree from Yale University , where he received his doctorate in 1954 under Ernest Pollard ( Energy levels of Ca Isotopes ). As a post-doctoral student he was with Tom Bonner at the Rice Institute and from 1956 to 1960 at the Argonne National Laboratory . He has been a senior physicist there since 1964. In 1964 he became associate director and from 1979 to 1982 director of the physics department. He was also professor at the University of Chicago from 1969 , where he retired in 2000.

In addition to experimental nuclear physics (nuclear structure, nuclear reactions, in particular for determining nuclear properties), he deals with cold crystalline plasmas. His group in Argonne was the first in the USA to repeat the experiments on the Mössbauer effect and he used it to measure the relativistic redshift. Schiffer also dealt with the search for more exotic objects. After the discovery of the quarks, he searched in vain for fractional charges and also searched (unsuccessfully) for helium-like strangelets .

At the Argonne Laboratory, he and colleagues developed a spectrometer for investigating unstable isotopes with transfer reactions (Helios, Helical Orbit Spectrometer). For example, a deuterium target is bombarded with a beam of unstable light nuclei ( inverse kinematics , the target is lighter than the projectile).

He was visiting scientist and visiting professor at the British Nuclear Research Center (AERE) in Harwell (1959/60), 1964 at Princeton University , 1967/68 at the University of Rochester and 1973/74 at the Technical University of Munich .

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1968), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1984), the National Academy of Sciences (1987) and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences ( 1996). In 1959 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Humboldt Research Award in 1973. He is an honorary doctor of the University of Notre Dame (1999).

In 1976 he received the Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics . In 1985 he received the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale University. From 1983 to 1985 he was Chairman of the Nuclear Physics Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation.

From 1972 to 1977 he was Associate Editor of Reviews of Modern Physics and from 1978 Co- Editor of Physics Letters. From 1971 to 1975 he was editor of Comments on Nuclear and Particle Physics.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life and career data based on CV from his homepage and American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ Page at the Argonne Laboratory . P. Mueller, Schiffer u. a. Search for anomalously heavy isotopes of helium in the Earth's atmosphere , Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 92, 2004, p. 022501
  3. ↑ AH Wuosmaa, Schiffer u. a. A solenoidal transport device for reactions in inverse kinematics , Nucl. Phys. A 746, 2004, p. 267, B. Back, Schiffer u. a. First Experiment with HELIOS: The Structure of 13 B , Phys. Rev. Lett., Volume 104, 2010, p. 132501 (study of the unstable boron isotope 12 B with 12 B (d, p) 13 B stripping reaction). Abstract
personal data
SURNAME Schiffer, John P.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schiffer, John Paul (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-American former experimental nuclear physicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest