Hans Frauenfelder | |
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Born | June 28, 1922 Schaffhausen, Switzerland |
Residence | United States |
Citizenship | American |
Fields | Physicist |
Institutions | Los Alamos National Laboratory University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Alma mater | Swiss Federal Institute of Technology |
Doctoral advisor | Paul Scherrer |
Other academic advisors | Gregor Wentzel Wolfgang Pauli |
Known for | Perturbed angular correlation |
Hans Frauenfelder was born June 28, 1922 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. He is notable for his 1951 discovery of perturbed angular correlation (PAC). Today, PAC spectroscopy is widely used in the study of condensed-matter physics.
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He received his Dr. sc. nat. in physics in 1950 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich under Paul Scherrer. His thesis was on the study of radioactive surfaces. At ETH he was also taught by Gregor Wentzel and Wolfgang Pauli. Through Pauli, he also got to know many of the leading scientists such as Hendrik Kramers, Werner Heisenberg, Hans Jensen, and Wolfgang Paul.
Frauenfelder migrated to the US in 1952, joining the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a research associate. He stayed at the UIUC till 1992, ultimately as Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics, Chemistry, and Biophysics. His research interests included nuclear physics, particle physics, conservation laws, the Mössbauer effect, and biophysics. In 1992, Frauenfelder moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory where he directed the Center for Nonlinear Studies (CNLS) until 1997. In 1997 he left CNLS and joined the theoretical biology and biophysics group at Los Alamos (T-10 recently renamed T-6) and continues research in biophysics.
Frauenfelder is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.