Fritz London

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Fritz London
London dispersion forces
London equations[1]
London moment
London penetration depth
AwardsLorentz Medal (1953)
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics
InstitutionsDuke University
University of Berlin
University of Oxford
Collège de France
Academic advisorsMax von Laue

Fritz Wolfgang London (March 7, 1900 – March 30, 1954) was a German born physicist and professor at Duke University. His fundamental contributions to the theories of chemical bonding and of intermolecular forces (London dispersion forces) are today considered classic and are discussed in standard textbooks of physical chemistry. With his brother Heinz London, he made a significant contribution to understanding electromagnetic properties of superconductors with the London equations and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on five separate occasions.

Biography

London was born in

naturalized citizen in 1945. Later in his life, London was a professor at Duke University. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1953. He died from a heart ailment in Durham, North Carolina, in 1954.[2]

Academic achievements

Fritz London at the Bunsen Congress, Munich, 1928

London's early work with

Pauli principle
.

Other early work of London was in the area of

nanometer) distance from each other. Nowadays this attraction is often referred to as "London force". In 1930 he gave (together with R. Eisenschitz)[4] a unified treatment of the interaction between two noble gas atoms that attract each other at large distance, but repel each other at short distances. Eisenschitz and London showed that this repulsion is a consequence of enforcing the electronic wavefunction to be antisymmetric under electron permutations. This antisymmetry is required by the Pauli principle and the fact that electrons are fermions
.

For atoms and

dipole moments
.

London was the first theoretical physicist to make the fundamental, and at the time controversial, suggestion that

Bose–Einstein condensation. Bose
recognized that the statistics of massless photons could also be applied to massive particles; he did not contribute to the theory of the condensation of bosons.

London was also one of the early authors (including

gauge invariance (Weyl) in the context of the then new quantum mechanics
.

London predicted the effect of flux quantization in superconductors and with his brother Heinz postulated that the electrodynamics of superconductors is described by a massive field. I.e. that whilst magnetic flux is expelled from a superconductor, this happens exponentially over a finite length with an exponent which is now called the London penetration depth.

London also developed a theory of a rotational response of a superconductor, pointing out that rotation of a superconductor generates magnetic field London moment. This effect is used in models of rotational dynamics of neutron stars.

Fritz London Memorial Lectures and Prize

Main articles:
List of Fritz London Memorial Prizes

Since 1956, the Fritz London Memorial Lectures have brought to the scientific community at Duke University a distinguished group of lecturers including twenty Nobel laureates. The scientific interests of each lecturer impinge at one or more points upon the various fields of physics and chemistry to which Fritz London contributed. In December 1972, John Bardeen, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, established an endowment fund "to perpetuate the memory of Fritz London, distinguished scientist and member of the Duke faculty from 1939 to the time of his death in 1954, and to promote research and understanding of Physics at Duke University and in the wider scientific community". The fund is to be used to underwrite the Fritz London Memorial Prize, given in recognition of outstanding contributions in Low Temperature Physics,[5] and provide support for the London Memorial Lectures at Duke University.[6]

References

  1. doi:10.1098/rspa.1935.0048
    .
  2. doi:10.1063/pt.5.031430
    .
  3. S2CID 119739102
    .
  4. S2CID 125644826
    .
  5. ^ "Fritz London Memorial Prize". Phy.duke.edu. Retrieved 2013-08-02.
  6. ^ Fritz London Memorial lecture "Duke Physics". Archived from the original on 2012-03-01. Retrieved 2012-02-19.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Fritz London.
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