Maurice Goldhaber

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Maurice Goldhaber, 1937

Maurice Goldhaber (born Moritz Goldhaber, born April 18, 1911 in Lemberg , then Austria, now Ukraine , †  May 11, 2011 in East Setauket , USA ) was an American physicist.

Born in the Austro-Hungarian Lemberg, Goldhaber went to high school in Chemnitz . There he was a model for a sculpture by the sculptor Heinrich Brenner in 1928, the original version of which can no longer be seen at the Georgius-Agricola-Gymnasium in Chemnitz , because it was removed in 1936 because of Goldhaber's Jewish origin. In 1998 the sculpture was redesigned by the sculptor Erik Neukirchner .

Goldhaber studied and worked at Cambridge University in England , where he received his doctorate in 1936 and was a fellow of Magdalene College (until 1938).

In 1938 he emigrated to the USA and became assistant professor and from 1945 professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago . From 1950 he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory , which he later headed as chairman of the physics department (1960) and director (1961 to 1973). At that time he was already using Maurice as his first name. Goldhaber was known in Brookhaven as the hands on director, and he initiated and presided over an extraordinarily successful period of the laboratory. Scientists at the laboratory were awarded three Nobel prizes in physics for work during his time as director . From 1961 he was also adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook .

Goldhaber was best known for his work in the field of nuclear and particle physics .

In collaboration with James Chadwick , Goldhaber was the first to succeed as a student in 1934 in precisely determining the mass of neutrons (in the photo-decay of the deuteron ) and thus proving that neutrons are independent particles and not part of protons or electrons . From this work it could be deduced that neutrons are likely to be unstable. This knowledge became groundbreaking for nuclear and particle physics, where many unstable particles were still discovered (and Goldhaber was one of the first to suggest a possible instability of the proton in 1954, which was later predicted by GUTs but has not yet been experimentally decided to this day) . After that he dealt intensively with nuclear physics. In the 1930s he and Chadwick discovered the decay of a number of unstable light atomic nuclei when bombarded with slow neutrons and he also showed the possibility of using beryllium as a neutron moderator substance .

Together with his wife Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber , he showed that the electrons in beta decay are identical to the atomic electrons. With Edward Teller he developed the theory of giant dipole resonance in atomic nuclei.

In the Goldhaber experiment (1956 to 1958, together with Lee Grodzins and Andrew Sunyar ) the helicity of the neutrinos was determined - they are left-handed, which confirmed the VA theory of the weak interaction (and again the parity violation ).

After leaving the Brookhaven Lab, he joined the Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven (IMB) collaboration to investigate the possibility of proton decay . With their detector, they were able to discover the neutrinos from Supernova 1987A at the same time as the Kamiokande detector . Goldhaber also took part in research on the successor Super-Kamiokande .

Goldhaber received various awards for his work, including the Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1971, the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize (1982), the National Medal of Science 1983, the Wolf Prize in Physics (1991) and the Enrico Fermi Prize (1999). He is an honorary doctor a . a. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and Tel Aviv University . In 1983 he was President of the APS. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1965). In 1972 he was admitted to the American Philosophical Society . In 2001 the Brookhaven National Laboratory created the Gertrude and Maurice Goldhaber Distinguished Fellowships to promote particularly talented young scientists.

After he celebrated his 100th birthday, Goldhaber died after a short illness.

literature

  • G. Feinberg, AW Sunyar and J. Weneser: A Festschrift for Maurice Goldhaber . New York Academy of Sciences, 1993, ISBN 0897660862

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ School chronicle - 1857 until today. Georgius Agricola Gymnasium, accessed October 11, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Until his departure in 1950 he was listed as Moritz Goldhaber at the University of Illinois . See Meeting of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. September 29, 1950, accessed on October 11, 2018 (English, p. 69).
  3. ^ Member History: Maurice Goldhaber. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 24, 2018 (with a short biography).
  4. ^ Goldhaber Distinguished Fellowship. bnl.gov (English).;
  5. ↑ Message from the Brookhaven National Laboratory on the death of Goldhabers ( memento of the original from June 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (engl.) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bnl.gov

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Goldhaber, Maurice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goldhaber, Moritz (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Lviv
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 2011
Place of death East Setauket (NY)