Wolfgang Helfrich

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Wolfgang Helfrich (born March 25, 1932 in Munich ) is a German physicist .

Life

Helfrich studied physics from 1951 to 1958 at the universities of Göttingen, Munich and Tübingen . It was in 1961 at the Technical University of Munich on the subject of space charge Limited currents in Anthrazenkristallen doctorate , where he was to 1964 research assistant worked. From 1964 to 1966 he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa .

On his return to Munich, he was in 1967 on the subject of space charge Limited and certain volume flows in organic crystals habilitation . He then was Member of the Technical Staff at RCA Laboratories in Princeton until 1970 , where he worked on the research area of liquid crystals . He spent the next three years as a research assistant at Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel , where he first worked on liquid crystals and later on lipid membranes.

On his last day at Roche, April 30, 1973, he was offered a position at the Free University of Berlin . There he was a professor in the physics department and most recently headed the fluid membranes and liquid crystals group at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. He spent several months researching at Orsay (1977), at Stanford University (1982) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (1989). He retired in April 1997 and continues to live in Berlin.

Services

In 1970, Helfrich found the theoretical concept for the first technically and commercially revolutionary liquid crystal display , the TN cell, also known in Europe as the Schadt-Helfrich cell . His colleague Martin Schadt then built the first sample of such an advertisement. The patent was not granted by the Munich Patent Office because the discovery and development would have no inventive step, as there were prior publications by James Fergason from the USA. Today the principle of the Schadt-Helfrich cell is used in millions of products worldwide.

Awards and honors

  • 1976 - EPS Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize for outstanding achievements in the field of semiconductor technology for contributions to the physics of liquid crystals.
  • 1993 - Aachen and Munich Prize for Technology and Applied Natural Sciences from the Dr. Carl Arthur Pastor Foundation to Wolfgang Helfrich and Martin Schadt for the groundbreaking invention of the liquid crystal display as a key component in information technology.
  • 1993 - Wolfgang Ostwald Prize of the Colloid Society in recognition of his outstanding colloid chemical work in the field of liquid crystals, membranes and vesicles.
  • 1993 - Innovation Prize Science for Art (Moet Hennessy - Louis Vuitton, France) for his research in the field of liquid crystal displays.
  • 1996 - Robert Wichard Pohl Prize of the German Physical Society to Wolfgang Helfrich and Martin Schadt in recognition of the invention of liquid crystal displays.
  • Honored Member of the International Liquid Crystal Society
  • 2008 IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal , together with Martin Schadt and James Fergason "for pioneering development of twisted nematic liquid crystal technology"
  • 2012 - Charles Stark Draper Prize (US NAE)
  • 2012 - Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics for contributions to the foundation of biophysics of membranes (shared with Carlos Bustamante )

Publications (excerpt)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Ostwald Prize 1993 awarded to Wolfgang Helfrich in Progress in Colloid and Polymer Science, Volume 95 (1994), Surfactants and Colloids in the Environment
  2. ↑ Maike Sutor: Why Wolfgang Helfrich didn't get rich, the father of the LCD display. Berliner Zeitung April 8, 1995.
  3. ^ The Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics , Tel Aviv University, accessed online September 20, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Helfrich, Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich