Rudolf Seeliger

Rudolf Karl Hans Seeliger (born November 12, 1886 in Munich , † January 20, 1965 in Greifswald ) was a German physicist who dealt (mainly theoretically) with gas discharge physics and founded a corresponding school at the University of Greifswald.

Life

Rudolf Seeliger was the son of the future director of the Munich observatory Hugo von Seeliger .

Rudolf Seeliger studied from 1906 to 1909 at the universities of Tübingen , Heidelberg and Munich . In 1910 he did his doctorate with Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich ("The theory of the conduction of electricity in dense gases", Annalen der Physik, Vol. 33, 1910, pp. 319-380). Then he was at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in Berlin and at the same time private lecturer at the University of Berlin .

In 1918 he became an associate professor at the University of Greifswald under Johannes Stark and in 1921 he became a full professor of theoretical physics there. In 1940 he became director of the Physics Institute there and from 1946 to 1948 he was rector of the University of Greifswald. From 1949 he was the successor of Paul Schulz (who developed the xenon high pressure lamp there in 1948) in Greifswald head of the "Institute for Gas Discharge Physics" of the Academy of Sciences, the predecessor of today's Leibniz Institute for Plasma Research and Technology .

During the investigation of the passage of electron beams (cathode rays) through gases with Ernst Gehrcke from the PTR, they made observations in the spring of 1912 ("About the glow of gases under the influence of cathode rays", negotiations of the German Physical Society Vol. 15, 1912, p . 534), which later (correctly interpreted) by James Franck and Gustav Hertz in the Franck-Hertz experiment (correctly interpreted) became one of the pillars of quantum theory (Franck and Hertz received the Nobel Prize for this in 1925).

In 1921, Seeliger wrote the article "Electron Theory of Metals" in the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences . He was also the editor of the famous physics textbook by Ernst Grimsehl .

Seeliger was a member of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin . In 1950 he was awarded the GDR National Prize for Physics . In 1956 he received the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver.

A street in Greifswald is named after him.

Fonts

• Introduction to the physics of gas discharges , Leipzig, Barth, 1927
• with Georg Mierdel General characteristics of independent discharges, the arc discharge , Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft., 1929
• Applied atomic physics; an introduction to the theoretical basics , Springer, 1938, 1944
• The basic relationships of the new physics , Barth, 1948
• with Carl Ernst Heinrich Grimsehl, Walter Schallreuter Textbook of Physics Vol. 1 to 4, Teubner, 1951 to 1959 and more often

literature

• Dieter Hoffmann:  Seeliger, Rudolf . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Dieter Hoffmann:  Seeliger, Rudolf Karl Hans. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 150 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Rudolf Seeliger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Rudolf Seeliger in the state bibliography MV
• Alfred Rutscher: Gas discharge and plasma physics in Greifswald. 1999, archived from the original on March 29, 2003 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Walter Schallreuter: The history of the physical institute of the University of Greifswald. In: Festschrift for the 500th anniversary of the University of Greifswald. Volume 2. Greifswald 1956, p. 461.
2. ^ Honoring deserved scientists , In: Neues Deutschland , October 18, 1956, p. 1

predecessor	Office	successor
Ernst Lohmeyer	Rector of the University of Greifswald 1946–48	Rudolf Gross