William Fairbank Sr.

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Martin Fairbank Sr. (born February 24, 1917 in Minneapolis , † September 30, 1989 in Palo Alto ) was an American physicist .

Life

Fairbank studied at Whitman College (Bachelor in 1939) in Walla Walla , Washington and received his doctorate in 1948 at Yale University with CT Lane in cryogenic physics . During World War II he was at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1947 he was an assistant professor at Amherst College and from 1952 at Duke University , where he later became a professor. The invitation to Duke University came from Fritz London , who as a theoretician dealt with superconductors and superfluids and wanted to have a corresponding experimental research established. From 1959 Fairbank was a professor at Stanford University . From 1985 he was Professor Emeritus there. He died of a heart attack while jogging.

Fairbank was a pioneer in low temperature physics. At Duke University he investigated the properties of liquid helium and examined, among other things, the lambda transition of helium-4 (divergence of the specific heat at the transition to the superfluid state ) and the phase mixture of helium 3 and 4. In Stanford, his group was the first to develop superconducting cavity resonators for particle accelerators. He and his doctoral student Bascom Deaver found there in 1961 as one of the first quantized values ​​of the magnetic flux in superconducting cylinders. This discovery of flow quantization (with confirmation of the BCS theory ) was achieved independently and at about the same time as Martin Näbauer and Robert Doll from the Technical University of Munich, who published in the same issue of Physical Review Letters.

His decades of work at Stanford to test a prediction of general relativity led to the Gravity Probe mission (with superconducting gyroscopes in an earth orbit) under the direction of his former colleague and colleague Francis Everitt after his death . As early as 1963, he was involved in experiments in space as a member of the NASA Physics Committee. In the 1970s, he investigated the influence of microgravity in space on experiments on phase transitions in liquid helium, e.g. B. The Lambda Point Experiment carried out in the Space Shuttle in 1992.

In 1977 he and George Larue claimed to have found evidence of the existence of a free quark (i.e. a particle with about a third of the electron charge) in a greatly improved version of Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment . In 1979 he reported a second observation of a quark. His find could not be confirmed by any other group. He worked on improving the experiment until his death.

His brother Henry A. Fairbank (* 1918) was also a physics professor (Yale University, Duke University). One of his three sons, William M. Fairbank Junior, is a professor of physics at Colorado State University .

Honors

In 1963, Fairbank received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize. In 1967 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1968 he received the Fritz London Memorial Prize . He was a three-time honorary doctor. In 1962 he was named "California Scientist of the Year". In 1963 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 1978 of the American Philosophical Society .

Web links

  • Horst Meyer, Blas Cabrera, Peter Michelson: William Martin Fairbank Sr. In: National Academy of Sciences (Ed.): Biographical Memoirs . 2011 ( nasonline.org [PDF]).
  • William Martin Fairbank. In: Physics History Network. American Institute of Physics, accessed October 22, 2018.
  • William M. Fairbank. Physics Department, Duke University(English).;
  • Blas Cabrera, CWF Everitt, Bascom S. Deaver: William M. Fairbank . In: Physics Today . tape 44 , no. 2 , 1991, p. 112 , doi : 10.1063 / 1.2810005 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BS Deaver, Fairbank: Experimental evidence of quantized flux in superconducting cylinders . In: Phys.Rev.Lett. , 7, 1961, pp. 43-46, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.7.43 .
  2. ↑ The idea came from the theorist Leonard Schiff , who discussed it with Fairbank in the early 1960s. The evaluation of the data recorded in 2004/2005 dragged on until 2011.
  3. ↑ George LaRue, Fairbank, Arthur Hebard: Evidence for the existence of fractional charge on matter . In: Phys.Rev.Lett. , 38, 1977, pp. 1011-1014, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.38.1011 , abstract .
  4. ↑ Experiments that found nothing against it are, for example, RG Milner et al .: Search for fractional charge in Niobium and Tungsten . In: Phys.Rev.Lett. , 54, 1985, p. 1472, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.54.1472 .
  5. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members (PDF); Retrieved April 2, 2016
  6. ^ Member History: William M. Fairbank. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 3, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Fairbank, William Sr.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fairbank, William Martin Sr. (full name); Fairbank, William Martin Sr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Minneapolis
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 1989
Place of death Palo Alto