Karl-Heinz Höcker

Karl-Heinz Höcker (born December 27, 1915 in Bremen ; † July 17, 1998 ) was a German physicist who dealt with the theory of nuclear reactors .

Live and act

Höcker studied from 1935 to 1940 at the University of Marburg and the Humboldt University in Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1940 under Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker ( cross sections of the reactions between neutrons and deuterons , Physikalische Zeitschrift Vol. 43, 1942, p. 236). As early as 1939 he worked with Paul Müller and Weizsäcker at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin-Dahlem on the theory of nuclear reactors . In 1942 he was Weizsäcker's assistant there after he, like Weizsäcker's other assistant Müller, who fell in Russia, had to do his military service (he was released in 1942 for health reasons). In 1942 he went with Weizsäcker to the University of Strasbourg (and in 1944 to Hechingen ), where their theoretical investigations into the geometry of nuclear reactors made a lattice arrangement of fuel elements appear advantageous, which was also implemented in the form of cube lattices. She prevailed against Heisenberg's shift arrangement, first in experiments by Kurt Diebner in Gottow , then also in the Heisenberg group. At that time he also dealt with cosmic radiation and plasma physics (high-current charcoal arcs, which the Strasbourg professor Wolfgang Finkelnburg examined). In 1948 he was a lecturer and from 1955 associate professor for theoretical physics and nuclear technology at the University of Stuttgart . There he founded the working group for nuclear technology in 1955, from which the Institute for Nuclear Energy (today Institute for Nuclear Energy and Energy Systems, IKE) emerged, and became its first director in 1963. At the same time he became a professor in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. In 1986 he retired.

Fonts

• with Dieter Emendörfer: Theory of Nuclear Reactors , 2 volumes, BI University Pocket Books, Vol. 1 1969 (2nd edition 1982), Vol. 2 1993 (Vol. 1 "The stationary reactor", Vol. 2 "The unsteady reactor")
• with H.Grümm: Linear Reactor Kinetics and Perturbation Theory , 1958, Springer, Results of the Exact Natural Sciences, Vol. 30, pp. 134–285

Web links

• Höcker "Report on a cube experiment with uranium and paraffin", 1942, Deutsches Museum
• Festive Colloquium for Höcker at the University of Stuttgart ( Memento from November 26, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
• Horst Kant "On the history of physics at the University of Strasbourg during the Second World War", preprint, MPI History of Science 1997, PDF file (119 kB)

References

1. ↑ Evidence of data
2. ↑ Protons as the primary component of cosmic rays , Zeitschrift für Physik, Vol. 124, 1947, pp. 352, 391, his habilitation
3. ^ Karl-Heinz Höcker, Wolfgang Finkelnburg: Theory of the high-current arc column. In: Journal for Nature Research . 1, 1946, pp. 305-310 ( online ).