Thomas Walcher

Thomas Walcher (born February 10, 1941 in Kiel ) is a German physicist, son of the physicist Wilhelm Walcher . Since 2006 he has been a professor emeritus at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz .

From 1966 to 1973 he worked at the Institute for Technical Nuclear Physics at the TH Darmstadt , where he carried out experiments on electron scattering on nuclei with small momentum transfers at DALINAC. In 1971 he received his doctorate there with a thesis on the inelastic states of the ⁴ He under Peter Brix . In 1971, together with Rainer Pitthan, he discovered, among other things, isoscalar quadrupole giant resonance , which can be understood as a pure form oscillation without charge separation. Until then, only the isovector-like giant dipole resonance, which can be understood as the oscillation of the protons against the neutrons, was known. The discovery of the giant quadrupole resonances played an important role in the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Aage Niels Bohr and Ben Mottelson . It was a key to a better understanding of the central "unified model" of the core of Gerald Brown .

In 1973 he followed Peter Brix to the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg and worked on heavy ion experiments and was involved in the construction of a high-frequency post accelerator. In 1978 he moved to CERN in the group of Bogdan Povh and worked with him on experiments to Hyper cores , low-energy antiproton reactions and deep inelastic muon scattering . In 1982 he received the Röntgen Prize for the discovery of the quadrupole giant resonance in nuclei and other significant contributions to nuclear, high-energy and heavy ion physics.

After rejecting calls to the KVI at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and to the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, he accepted an appointment at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz in 1985 . In Mainz, he played a leading role at the Mainz Mikrotron MAMI as director of the Institute for Nuclear Physics and as spokesman for two special research areas of the DFG. In Mainz he dealt with the structure of hadrons at low energies in the border area of ​​particle and nuclear physics, in particular through investigations of the electromagnetic pion production on the proton and measurement of the elastic form factors of the neutron and proton.

Thomas Walcher was editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Physics A Hadrons and Nuclei from 1999 to 2007 . He was also a consultant and reviewer in numerous national and international organizations (DFG, BMFT, CERN, DOE, MIT, DAPNIA Saclay, and others).

Fonts

• Editor, European Hadron Facility , Proceedings, International Conference, Mainz, Germany, March 1986, Nucl. Phys. B 279 (1987)
• Editor with Dieter Drechsel, Aaron Bernstein: Chiral Dynamics: Theory and Experiment (Workshop Mainz September 1997), Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Physics 513 (1998)
• Editor with Charlotte Elster, Josef Speth : Quark Nuclear Physics , International Conference Jülich 2002, Springer Verlag 2004
• Editor with H. Arenhoevel, H. Backe, D. Drechsel, J. Friedrich, K.-H. Kaiser, Proceedings of the Symposium: 20 years of physics at the Mainz Microtron MAMI , Mainz, Germany, October 2005, European Physical Journal A28, Suppl. 1 (2006)
• Editor with Josef Pochodzalla: Hypernuclear and Strange Particle Physics (9th International Conference on Hypernuclear and Strange Particle Physics, Mainz, October 2006), Springer Verlag 2007

Web links

• Homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Date of birth according to personal details in Physik Journal 2006, No. 1
2. ↑ R. Pitthan and T. Walcher, Inelastic electron scattering in the giant resonance region of La, Ce and Pr , Physics Letters B. 36, No. 6, 1971, pp. 563-564, abstract
3. ↑ Ben Mottelson, Elementary modes of excitation in the nucleus , Rev. Mod. Phys. vol. 48, 375 (1976)
4. ^ Laudation in the list of winners
5. ↑ SFB 201 and 443, DFG German Research Foundation