Karl Ludwig Thomas

Karl Ludwig Thomas (born August 7, 1933 in Gera ; † June 5, 2016 in Berlin ) was a German physicist .

Life

Thomas, son of a pastor, lived in Berlin from 1941 . After graduating from high school , he did an internship at Siemens-Schuckertwerke in Berlin. In 1953 he began studying experimental physics at the TU Berlin . In his diploma thesis with Hans Boersch in the 1st Physics Institute, he dealt with secondary electron emission . After the diploma in the winter semester 1959/1960, he was a research associate at Otto Dahl at the Institute of Metallurgy of the Technical University of Berlin and examined the influence of lattice defects to the hardening of aluminum - magnesium - alloys . With the resulting dissertation he received his doctorate in 1962 . He then continued his investigation with irradiation of his alloys at the reactor of the Hahn-Meitner Institute .

In 1963, Thomas became Senior Metallurgist at the Research and Development Center of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh and studied the thermal radiation of tungsten alloys for applications in lighting technology . In 1967 he returned to the TU Berlin and became senior engineer at the Institute for Metal Physics under Hans Wever . In 1969 he completed his habilitation with the thesis The temperature radiation of refractory transition metal alloys and then became professor for metal physics.

Thomas deepened his investigations into the thermal radiation properties of high temperature alloys with regard to applications for solar collectors in thermal solar systems . He combined thin layers of tungsten alloy with other materials to produce composite materials (cermets) with the lowest possible radiation in the infrared radiation range and the highest possible absorption in the solar radiation range . In addition to the heat radiation properties, he investigated the specific resistance , the electronic structure and the structure of high-temperature alloys, for which he also used research stays in the USA . Other research areas in cooperation with scientists in Berlin and the USA included magnetic properties, spin glasses and oxidation-resistant thin layers to protect superalloys against oxidation.

Thomas was involved in the committees of the TU Berlin and participated in new editions of Bergmann-Schaefer . He retired in 1998 without stopping his research.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Günter Frohberg, Karoline Thomas: Obituary for Karl Ludwig Thomas . In: Physics Journal . tape 16 , no. 2 , 2017, p. 48 .