Thomas Lauritsen
Thomas Lauritsen (born November 16, 1915 in Copenhagen , † October 16, 1973 in Pasadena ) was an American experimental nuclear physicist.
He was the son of nuclear physicist Charles Christian Lauritsen and was born in Denmark. He studied at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1936 and his doctorate in 1939. There he helped his father set up his laboratory for experimental nuclear physics (for example on an electrostatic generator of the van de Graaff type). As a post-doctoral student he was with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1939/40 with a Rockefeller scholarship , had to leave the country after the German invasion and was at the National Bureau of Standards in 1941. From 1942 he was back at Caltech, where he was Assistant Professor in 1946, Associate Professor in 1950 and Professor in 1955. During World War II he worked in military research for the US Navy (as did his father, William A. Fowler and other members of the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory), for example solid fuel rockets . Lauritsen was also involved in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in 1945 (on non-nuclear components of the atomic bomb).
Lauritsen was particularly concerned with the spectroscopy of light nuclei and regularly published the Energy levels of light nuclei reviews, in collaboration with his father, Fowler, Philip Morrison , WF Hornyak and later Fay Ajzenberg-Selove .
He also worked at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in 1952/53 (as a Fulbright Lecturer) and 1963/64.
He was married twice, his first marriage to a Dane. From his second marriage since 1946 he had two children.
Since 1965 Lauritsen was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, since 1969 a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1972 he was head of the nuclear physics department of the American Physical Society , and he represented the United States in the IUPAP in nuclear physics from 1963 to 1972 .
literature
- Biographical Memoirs National Academy of Science, by William Fowler, Fay Ajzenberg-Selove
Web links
- Biography at Caltech (PDF)
Individual evidence
- ^ First in the Reviews of Modern Physics 1948 with Hornyak
- ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 18, 2016
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lauritsen, Thomas |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American experimental nuclear physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 16, 1915 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Copenhagen |
| DATE OF DEATH | 16th October 1973 |
| Place of death | Pasadena |