Herbert Fröhlich

Herbert Fröhlich

Herbert Fröhlich (1905-1991)
Born 9 December 1905
Rexingen, German Empire
Died 23 January 1991 (aged 86)
Liverpool, England
Residence UK
Nationality British
Fields Physicist
Institutions University of Bristol
University of Liverpool
University of Salford
Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute
University of Freiburg
University of Bristol
Alma mater Ludwig-Maximilians University
Doctoral advisor Arnold Sommerfeld
Doctoral students Sebastian Doniach
Gerard Hyland
Other notable students Sigurd Zienau
Brendan Scaife
Known for Fröhlich coherence
Fröhlich polaron
Fröhlich Hamiltonian
Fröhlich term
Notable awards Max-Planck Medal (1972)

Signature

Notes
He is the brother of the mathematician Albrecht Fröhlich.

Herbert Fröhlich (9 December 1905 – 23 January 1991) was a German-born British physicist and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Fröhlich was the son of Fanny Frida (née Schwarz) and Jakob Julius Fröhlich, members of an old-established Jewish family.

Career

In 1927, Fröhlich entered the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, to study physics, and he received his doctorate under Arnold Sommerfeld, in 1930.[1] His first position was as Privatdozent at the University of Freiburg. Due to rising anti-Semitism and the Deutsche Physik movement under Adolf Hitler, and at the invitation of Yakov Frenkel, Fröhlich went to the Soviet Union, in 1933, to work at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad. During the Great Purge following the murder of Sergey Kirov, he fled to England in 1935. Except for a short visit to the Netherlands and a brief internment during World War II, he worked in Nevill Francis Mott’s department, at the University of Bristol, until 1948, rising to the position of Reader. At the invitation of James Chadwick, he took the Chair for Theoretical Physics at the University of Liverpool. [2]

He was offered by the Bell Telephone Laboratories a handsome salary to go to Princeton University as their specially endowed professor. But at Liverpool he had a purely research post, which was attractive to him, and he was newly married to an American postgraduate philosophy student, and later an artist, Fanchon Aungst, who was not keen to return to America at that time.

From 1973, he was Professor of Solid State Physics at the University of Salford, however, all the while maintaining an office at the University of Liverpool, where he gained emeritus status in 1976 until his death. During 1981, he was a visiting professor at Purdue University.[3][4] He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 and in 1964.[5]

Fröhlich proposed a theory of coherent excitations in biological systems known as Fröhlich coherence. A system that attains this state of coherence is known as a Fröhlich condensate. [6] [7][8]

Honours

Books

Bibliography

Notes

  1. ↑ Fröhlich – Mathematics Genealogy Project. Dr. phil. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. 1930 Dissertation title: Zum Photoeffekt an Metallen. Advisor: Arnold Sommerfeld.
  2. ↑ Biography of Herbert Frohlich (1905 - 1991) – Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics
  3. ↑ Fröhlich – Purdue University
  4. ↑ Fröhlich, Herbert FRS (1905-1991), Physicist – University of Liverpool
  5. ↑ Nobel Prize Nominations
  6. ↑ Long Range Coherence and Energy Storage in Biological Systems – H. Frohlich, Long Range Coherence and Energy Storage in Biological Systems, Int. J. Quantum Chem., v.II, 641-649 (1968)
  7. ↑ Coherent Excitations in Biological Systems – Herbert Fröhlich and F. Kremer Coherent Excitations in Biological Systems (Springer-Verlag, 1983) ISBN 978-3-642-69186-7
  8. ↑ Biological Coherence and Response to External Stimuli – Herbert Fröhlich, editor Biological Coherence and Response to External Stimuli (Springer, 1988) ISBN 978-0-387-18739-6

External links