Wilhelm Schütz (physicist)

Wilhelm Friedrich Gottfried Schütz (born August 18, 1900 in Frankfurt am Main ; † April 17, 1972 in Jena ) was a German experimental physicist who dealt with atomic and molecular spectroscopy and especially with magneto-optics and was a professor at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena was.

Schütz received his doctorate in 1923 under Walther Gerlach at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . He already dealt with magneto-optics in his dissertation. During his time as a doctoral student at Gerlach, he experienced the events of the famous Stern-Gerlach experiment of 1922 up close. In 1927 he completed his habilitation at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen and followed Gerlach to Munich, where in 1934 he became an associate professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1937 he became a full professor and institute director at the University of Königsberg . During the Second World War he was employed as a meteorologist. At the end of the Second World War he was at a branch of his institute in Jena, became a professor there in 1945 and again in 1952 and was a specialist in the Soviet Union ( Operation Ossawakim ) on an island in Lake Seliger near Ostashkow from 1946 to 1952 . Martin Kersten , who moved to the Federal Republic in 1951 , represented him in Jena .

In Jena he set up a modern institute for molecular physics with experiments on all wavelengths from X-ray spectroscopy to micro and radio waves, with the Raman effect and laser physics . In 1965 he retired. Under his student and successor at the Max Schubert chair , the focus on nonlinear optics was added.

Schütz dealt with magneto-optics, about which he wrote a section in the manual of experimental physics, and line broadening of spectral lines. He also wrote Faraday and (with Ernst Schmutzer ) Galilei biographies for Teubner-Verlag and wrote essays and lectured on a number of other physicists such as Robert Mayer , Ernst Abbe , Pieter Zeeman , Friedrich Paschen , Michail Wassiljewitsch Lomonossow .

In 1928 he married the physicist Lucie Mensing .

In 1970 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Jena.

literature

• R. Ritschl: Wilhelm Ritsch (* August 18, 1900, † April 17, 1972) , Physikalische Blätter , June 1972, online

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Directory of honorary doctors, Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Jena