Tom W. Bonner

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Tom W. Bonner (1950)

Tom Wilkerson Bonner (born October 19, 1910 in Greenville , Texas , † December 6, 1961 in Houston , Texas) was an American physicist who worked in the field of experimental nuclear physics .

Life

As a teenager, Bonner attended courses at Southern Methodist University in Texas and began studying physics in 1931 at Rice University , where he received his master's degree in 1932. Inspired by the work of James Chadwick , who succeeded in proving the existence of the neutron experimentally in 1932 , he turned to experimental neutron physics . He worked in this area until his untimely death in 1961. Through a National Research Fellowship, he was able to conduct research at the California Institute of Technology from 1934 . At the end of 1936 he returned to Rice University after a stay in Europe. 1938–1939 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Cambridge, Massachusetts . During this time he published important papers on nuclear reactions . During World War II he worked at the Radiation Laboratory of MIT on radar systems . After the end of the war he returned to Rice University, where he did research specifically on nuclear reactions at low energies.

In 1938 he became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1941 of the American Physical Society . Since 1959 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences .

Honors

The American Physical Society has awarded the Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics annually since 1965 .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics. American Physical Society, accessed January 11, 2016 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bonner, Tom W.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bonner, Tom Wilkerson (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Greenville , Texas
DATE OF DEATH December 6, 1961
Place of death Houston , Texas