Rudolf Peierls

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Sir Rudolf Peierls.

Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, (June 5, 1907, Berlin – September 19, 1995, Oxford), was a German-born British physicist.

The son of assimilated Jewish parents, he studied nuclear physics under the tutelage of Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli. His early work on quantum physics led to the theory of positive carriers to explain the thermal and electrical conductivity behaviors of semiconductors. He was studying on a Rockefeller Scholarship at Cambridge University when Adolf Hitler came to power in his native Germany. Granted leave to remain in Britain he became Professor of Physics at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England. In 1939, he started working on atomic research with Otto Robert Frisch and James Chadwick. Ironically, both Peierls and Frisch were excluded from working on RADAR as it was considered too secret for scientists with foreign backgrounds.

In March 1940, he co-authored the Frisch-Peierls memorandum with Frisch. This short paper was the first to set out how one could construct an atomic bomb from a small amount of fissionable uranium-235. They calculated that about 1kg would be needed. Until then it had been assumed that such a bomb would require many tons of uranium, and consequently was impractical to build and use. The paper was pivotal in igniting the interest of first the British and later the American authorities in atomic weapons. In 1941 its findings made their way to the United States through the report of the MAUD Committee, an important trigger in the establishment of the Manhattan Project and the subsequent development of the atomic bomb. He was also responsible for the recruitment of his compatriot Klaus Fuchs to the British project, an action which was to result in Peierls falling under suspicion when Fuchs was exposed as a Soviet spy in 1950.

Following the signature of the Quebec Agreement in August, 1943, Peierls joined the Manhattan Project in the United States, initially in New York and later at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where he played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb.

After the war, Peierls reassumed his position in the physics department at the University of Birmingham where he worked until 1963 before joining the University of Oxford. While at Birmingham he also worked as a consultant to the British atomic programme at Harwell. He was knighted in 1968. He retired from Oxford in 1974. He wrote several books including The Laws of Nature (1955), Surprises in Theoretical Physics (1979), More Surprises in Theoretical Physics (1991) and an autobiography, Bird of Passage (1985).

He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1962. In 1980 he received the Enrico Fermi Award from the US Government for exceptional contribution to the science of atomic energy [1].

On 2 October 2004, the building housing the sub-department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford was formally named the Sir Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics.