Seishi Kikuchi

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Seishi Kikuchi ( Japanese 菊池 正 士 , Kikuchi Seishi ; born August 25, 1902 in Tokyo Prefecture ; † November 12, 1974 ) was a Japanese physicist who is considered one of the fathers of nuclear physics in Japan and who carried out important experiments on electron diffraction in 1928.

Live and act

Kikuchi grew up in Tokyo, the fourth son of Dairoku Kikuchi , and studied physics at the Imperial University , where he graduated in 1926. In 1928 he discovered the Kikuchi lines in the image of electron diffraction on thin mica films (which thus provided images of crystals similar to those of X-ray diffraction known since Max von Laue and showed the wave nature of the electrons) and explained them. In 1929 he went to Germany to continue his studies, including to Göttingen (where he published on quantum statistics with Lothar Nordheim ) and to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig . In 1934 he became a professor at Osaka University , where he built the first Cockcroft-Walton generator for particle acceleration in Japan. After the Second World War he became the first director of the Institute for Nuclear Research at the University of Tokyo in 1955 (after he was at Cornell University in 1950/51 with Robert R. Wilson and Hans Bethe ), where he installed a cyclotron . 1959 to 1961 he was director of the 1956 founded Japanese Atomic Research Center (Genken) in Tōkai (the national reprocessing plant). Later he was President of the Tokyo University of Natural Sciences (Tokyo Rika Daigaku).

In 1951 he was awarded the Order of Culture , in 1957 he became a member of the Japanese Academy (Japan Academy).

Hideki Yukawa (1938) is one of his doctoral students .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oral History Interview of Hans Bethe by Hoddeson 1981
  2. ↑ The wave nature of electrons was previously demonstrated in 1927 by Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer by diffraction on nickel crystals and by George Paget Thomson
  3. ↑ Kikuchi, Nordheim On the fundamental kinetic equation in quantum statistics , Zeitschrift für Physik, Volume 60, 1930, p. 652.

literature

  • S. Noma (Ed.): Kikuchi Seishi . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 779.
personal data
SURNAME Kikuchi, Seishi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 菊池 正 士 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese physicist
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Tokyo prefecture
DATE OF DEATH November 12, 1974