Jules Horowitz

Jules Horowitz (born October 3, 1921 in Rzeszów ; † August 3, 1995 ) was a French physicist.

Horowitz came from a Jewish family in Poland who emigrated to Germany in the 1920s and then fled the Nazis to Metz. Under German occupation, they moved on to unoccupied France. Horowitz studied from 1941 at the École Polytechnique . In 1946 he was brought into the French nuclear energy program by Francis Perrin like other polytechnics ( Claude Bloch , Michel Trocheris). At the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA) he was involved in the development and commissioning of France's first nuclear reactor, the heavy water reactor ZOÉ in Fort de Châtillon south of Paris, which first became critical on December 15, 1948. The overall management had Frédéric Joliot-Curie as High Commissioner of the CEA and also involved were Lew Kowarski (who was involved in the construction of corresponding reactors in Chalk River in the Manhattan Project and supervised the construction), Bertrand Goldschmidt , Jules Guéron (1907-1990), Albert Messiah , Francis Perrin, Raoul Dautry (1880–1951) and Irène Joliot-Curie . Horowitz calculated the reactor core with the support of Anatole Abragam and the engineer André Ertaud. From 1950 he was like Bloch in the Service de physique mathématique of the CEA in Saclay under Jacques Yvon (1903-1979). Horowitz dealt there with the physics of nuclear reactors and was one of the founders of the French school of neutron physics in the field of nuclear technology, which also trained many of the second generation engineers in French nuclear technology. For the calculation of reactors, he also introduced the first electronic computing systems at the CEA and founded a computer center at the CEA. But he also dealt with pure theoretical physics. In 1948 he was at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen where he theoretically investigated the decay of muons.

In 1952 he became head of the Service de physique mathématique and in 1959 head of the nuclear reactors research department (Département des études de piles) and in 1962 director of the nuclear reactors department (Piles atomiques).

During the reorganization of the CEA in 1970, he founded the Institute for Basic Research (Institut de recherche fondamentale) of the CEA in Saclay and was its first director until 1986. From 1984 to 1987 he was President of the Commission for the Joint European Torus . From 1988 to 1993 he was President of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble.

He was significantly involved in the construction of the first nuclear reactor in Israel in Dimona ( Negev nuclear research facility ) in 1958 , which was carried out with French support.

He played a role in exposing the Avions Renifleurs fraud scandal in 1979 , in which Elf Aquitaine was cheated of large sums of money when they fell for a system to search for oil by air.

In 1988 he received the Prix ​​Ampère . He was in command of the Legion of Honor , the Ordre national du mérite and the Palmes académiques .

The Jules Horowitz research reactor under construction in Cadarache (2017) is named after him, as is the main campus of Caen University and a street in the research district (Polygone scientifique) of Grenoble.

He was the brother-in-law of the physicist Claude Bloch.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Le président Auriol inaugure la première pile atomique française, Zoé
2. ^ Short biography of Horowitz in C. Foasso's dissertation, Histoire de la sureté de l'énergie nucléaire en France (1945–2000), University Lumière-Lyon II, 2003
3. ^ Yves Bonnet, La disparition du père de la "bombe israélienne", Huffington Post 2015