Martin German

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Martin Deutsch (born January 15, 1917 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † August 16, 2002 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) was an Austrian-American experimental physicist. He discovered the positronium .

Life

Deutsch was born as the son of a Jewish couple ( Felix and Helene Deutsch ). His mother Helene Deutsch (1884–1982) was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Vienna and the last student of Sigmund Freud , who made her head of his Viennese psychoanalytic training institute in 1923. Martin Deutsch participated in the resistance against the Austro-fascist Dollfuss regime in 1934 and had to flee to Zurich , where he went to school and began studying at the ETH . In October 1935 he and his family moved to Cambridge in the USA, and Deutsch continued his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including in the laboratory of experimental physicist George Harrison . In 1937 he obtained his bachelor's degree there and in 1941 he did his doctorate with Robley D. Evans ( A study of nuclear radiations by means of a magnetic lens beta ray spectrometer ).

Since he was officially a German (since 1938) citizen, he was initially unable to work for the Manhattan Project . From 1943 he worked in Los Alamos with Emilio Segrè and Victor Weisskopf (who had attended the same school as Deutsch in Vienna a little earlier than the latter). Under Segré, he dealt there mainly with the experimental investigation of the physics of nuclear fission instead of technical questions of bomb design.

From 1946 he was at MIT, where he became a professor and stayed until his retirement. From 1973 to 1979 he was head of the Laboratory of Nuclear Science (LNS) at MIT, followed by Francis Low .

In 1951 he succeeded in experimentally confirming the existence of positronium , an important system for the precise testing of quantum electrodynamics, which was then just under development . Deutsch also measured its spectrum and other physical properties. Since it consists of an electron and its antiparticle, the positron , it annihilates in photons in a very short time: in the ground state a tenth of a nanosecond for para-positronium (spin 0), which annihilates in two or more generally an even number of photons, 140 Nanoseconds for ortho-positronium (spin 1), which decays into three photons. Carl David Anderson , among others, had theoretically predicted its existence in 1932.

He had been married since 1939 and had two children, including L. Peter Deutsch , the developer of Ghostscript and founder of the software company Aladdin. Henry W. Kendall is one of his students . Deutsch also brought Samuel Chao Chung Ting to MIT, where he carried out the work for which he received the Nobel Prize.

In 1953, German was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1958 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences .

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Elke Mühlleitner: Biographical Lexicon of Psychoanalysis. The members of the Psychological Wednesday Society and the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association 1902–1938 . Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1992 ISBN 3-89295-557-3 , p. 76
  2. ↑ He graduated from high school when German entered high school
  3. ↑ where Weisskopf and Bruno Rossi were at that time
  4. ↑ among other things by his former fellow student at MIT Richard Feynman . The properties of positronium in QED were calculated by Robert Karplus and Abraham Klein , among others , and later very precisely by Tōichirō Kinoshita .
  5. ↑ and independent of Andrija Mohorovičić 1934
  6. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1950-1999 ( [1] ). Page 4. Retrieved September 23, 2015
personal data
SURNAME German, Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American experimental physicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 2002
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts