Josef Mattauch

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Josef Mattauch (born November 21, 1895 in Mährisch-Ostrau , † August 10, 1976 in Klosterneuburg ) was an Austrian physicist .

Life

Josef Mattauch studied at the TH Vienna from 1913 , served as a soldier in the First World War and continued his studies at the University of Vienna in 1918 , where he received his doctorate in 1920. As an assistant at the 3rd Physics Institute, he confirmed the measurements of the elementary electrical charge by Robert Millikan . In 1926 he was on a Rockefeller Fellowship at Millikan in Pasadena, where he was already involved with mass spectrometry. In 1928 he completed his habilitation in Vienna, was a lecturer at the 1st Physics Institute and from 1935 an associate professor. He succeeded Lise Meitner in the physics department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, where he had been since 1938. Hahn's offer to Mattauch was also made on the advice of Lise Meitner and was the only way to obtain an advanced mass spectrograph at the institute, the great advantage of which had already been shown in the rubidium-strontium studies by Hahn and Strassmann. In 1941 he became head of the radiophysics department there. After the war-related move of the institute from Berlin, where it suffered serious bomb damage, to Tailfingen for the years 1944 to 1949 (from 1946 as its director, successor to Otto Hahn ) and the rebuilding of the institute as the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz (from 1949) also as director. He was in the USA for stays abroad and was visiting professor in Tübingen and Bern, and in 1952 continued his precision measurements of atomic masses. In 1957 he was one of the signatories of the " Göttingen Declaration " by 18 nuclear physicists, who spoke out against the planned arming of the Bundeswehr with nuclear weapons . Mattauch headed the institute until his retirement in 1965.

One focus of his work was the investigation of isotope abundance using mass spectrography . In 1934 he established Mattauch's isobar rule . He is one of the pioneers of mass spectrometry and together with Richard Herzog , whom he encouraged to study ion optics in mass spectrometers, he presented the design of an improved ( double-focusing ) mass spectrometer (ion optics according to Mattauch-Herzog) in 1934 . Devices based on this design were created in the USA in the 1930s and in 1936 by Mattauch and Herzog. It enabled precision measurements of atomic masses and isotope abundances, which was primarily known for. The beginnings of the systematic compilation of the data (binding energy, isotope frequency, etc.) of the atomic nuclei go back to him. Mattauch was a member of the International Commission for Atomic Weights and also played a key role in the introduction of the international atomic weight scale in the 1950s (with carbon instead of oxygen as the basis).

The German Society for Mass Spectrometry named a sponsorship award after him and Herzog.

His official estate is in the archive of the Max Planck Society .

Awards

Publications

  • Nuclear physics tables , Springer 1942 (with an introduction to nuclear physics by Siegfried Flügge )
  • On the system of isotopes . Z. physics. 91. 1934, 361-371
  • Fifty years of radioactivity: from Henri Becquerel to Otto Hahn , Universitas Moguntina, Mainz: Kupferberg 1948
  • with Arnold Flammersfeld: Isotope report: tabular overview of the properties of atomic nuclei, as far as known until the end of 1948 , Zeitschrift für Naturforschung (special issue), Tübingen 1949

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Carsten Reinhardt: mass spectrometry as a methodological bracket of the institute 1939-1978, Horst Kant, Carsten Reinhardt (ed.), 100 years of Kaiser Wilhelm / Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, MPG Berlin-Dahlem 2012, p. 102
  2. ↑ Silke Fengler: Cores, Cooperation and Competition. Nuclear research in Austria in an international context (1900-1950), Böhlau 2015, p. 292
  3. ↑ Text of the Göttingen Declaration 1957 at uni-goettingen.de
  4. ↑ Mattauch, Herzog, On a New Mass Spectrograph, Z. f. Physik, Vol. 89, 1934, pp. 786-795
  5. ^ Mattauch-Herzog sponsorship award, DGMS
  6. ↑ TU Wien: Honorary doctorates ( memento of the original from February 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved March 26, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tuwien.ac.at
personal data
SURNAME Mattauch, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Ostrava
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1976
Place of death Klosterneuburg