James Franck The Nobel Prize in Physics 1925

biography

James Franck Institute

The James Franck Institute, originally the Institute for the Study of Metals, grew out of the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and began its mission with a narrower focus than the Enrico Fermi Institute--specifically, to conduct research on the fundamental aspects of metallurgy and solid-state physics. Headed by metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith, the new institute consisted of chemists, physicists and metallurgists.
The spectrum of research has since evolved into the much broader study of the chemistry and physics of materials--gases, liquids and solids--including the behavior of superconductors, granular materials and complex fluids.
In 1967, the institute was renamed the James Franck Institute, reflecting its broader research interests and honoring the memory of James Franck, a chemist and Nobel laureate who was a leading scientist in the field of photosynthesis. Franck was a member of the Chicago faculty from 1938 until his death in 1964.
Just five years after it was established, the institute built a low-temperature laboratory that was, at the time, the largest facility of its kind at any university. The low-temperature laboratory made possible early studies of superconductivity--the nearly complete disappearance of electrical resistance at extremely low temperatures. In 1964, the University constructed an ultra-low-temperature laboratory, enabling scientists to conduct experiments at temperatures within several thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Theoretical work on superconductivity in the 1950s and 1960s by Leo Falicov, Morrel Cohen and James Phillips evolved into the studies of "high"-temperature superconductivity that continue at the institute.

Today, under the direction of David Oxtoby, Professor in Chemistry and JFI, the institute is part of the national Science and Technology Center for Superconductivity Research, a consortium formed in 1989 between Chicago, the University of Illinois, Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern and funded by the National Science Foundation. Associate Director Kathryn Levin, Professor in Physics and JFI, heads the Chicago contingent.

True to the interdisciplinary focus of the Research Institutes, many research areas within JFI straddle the boundary between chemistry and physics--for example, the work pioneered by Yuan Lee in the 1960s and 1970s on molecular-beam spectroscopy. Lee, who received the Nobel Prize in 1986, after he left the University, used crossed molecular beams to measure the forces between atoms and molecules. Later, Donald Levy, the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor in Chemistry and JFI, and Lennard Wharton developed a supersonic nozzle to cool large molecules and clusters to study their properties. Laurie Butler, Associate Professor in Chemistry and JFI, currently uses similar techniques to study chemical reactions. Another major area of research in the James Franck Institute is materials science. Many of the faculty members in JFI are also part of the Materials Research Science & Engineering Center (MRSEC), funded by the National Science Foundation to conduct fundamental studies into the behavior of disordered materials, self-ordered systems and catalysis.

MRSEC director Leo Kadanoff, the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in Physics, Mathematics, JFI and EFI, is a leader in the field of nonlinear dynamics, particularly in chaos theory and fluid turbulence. Current work at MRSEC includes theoretical and experimental studies of low-temperature magnetism and flow in granular materials. The importance of the research in granular materials to industries such as construction, mining and pharmaceuticals is again attracting corporate funding to the Research Institutes.

The 26 faculty members in JFI continue to perform cutting-edge research in a variety of fields, including non-equilibrium phenomena, phase transitions, chemical kinetics, laser spectroscopy, semiconductors and polymer physics. The institute also supports a large number of research associates and graduate students, and it offers a weekly colloquium series and frequent special seminars.

James Franck was born on August 26, 1882, in Hamburg, Germany. After attending the Wilhelm Gymnasium there, he studied mainly chemistry for a year at the University of Heidelberg, and then studied physics at the University of Berlin, where his principal tutors were Emil Warburg and Paul Drude. He received his Ph.D. at Berlin in 1906 under Warburg, and after a short period as an assistant in Frankfurt-am-Main, he returned to Berlin to become assistant to Heinrich Rubens. In 1911, he obtained the "venia legendi" for physics to lecture at the University of Berlin, and remained there until 1918 (with time out for the war in which he was awarded the Iron Cross, first class) as a member of the physics faculty having achieved the rank of associate professor. After World War I, he was appointed member and Head of the Physics Division in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry at Berlin-Dahlem, which was at that time under the chairmanship of Fritz Haber. In 1920, Franck became Professor of Experimental Physics and Director of the Second Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of G?ttingen. During the period 1920-1933, when G?ttingen became an important center for quantum physics, Franck was closely cooperating with Max Born, who then headed the Institute for Theoretical Physics. It was in G?ttingen that Franck revealed himself as a highly gifted tutor, gathering around him and inspiring a circle of students and collaborators (among them: Blackett, Condon, Kopfermann, Kroebel, Maier-Leibnitz, Oppenheimer, and Rabinovich, to mention some of them), who in later years were to be renowned in their own fields.

After the Nazi regime assumed power in Germany, Franck and his family moved to Baltimore, U.S.A., where he had been invited to lecture as Speyer Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He then went to Copenhagen, Denmark, as a guest professor for a year. In 1935, he returned to the United States as Professor of Physics at Johns Hopkins University, leaving there in 1938 to accept a professorship in physical chemistry at the University of Chicago. During World War II Franck served as Director of the Chemistry Division of The Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, which was the center of the Manhattan District's Project.

In 1947, at the age of 65, Franck was named professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, but he continued to work at the University as Head of the Photosynthesis Research Group until 1956.

While in Berlin Professor Franck's main field of investigation was the kinetics of electrons, atoms, and molecules. His initial researches dealt with the conduction of electricity through gases (the mobility of ions in gases). Later, together with Hertz, he investigated the behaviour of free electrons in various gases - in particular the inelastic impacts of electrons upon atomswork which ultimately led to the experimental proof of some of the basic concepts of Bohr's atomic theory, and for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize, for 1925. Franck's other investigations, many of which were carried out with collaborators and students, were also dedicated to problems of atomic physics - those on the exchange of energy of excited atoms (impacts of the second type, photochemical researches), and optical problems connected with elementary processes during chemical reactions. During his period at G?ttingen most of his studies were dedicated to the fluorescence of gases and vapours. In 1925, he proposed a mechanism to explain his observations of the photochemical dissociation of iodine molecules. Electronic transitions from a normal to a higher vibrational state occur so rapidly, he suggested, that the position and momenta of the nuclei undergo no appreciable change in the process. This proposed mechanism was later expanded by E. U. Condon to a theory permitting the prediction of mostfavoured vibrational transitions in a band system, and the concept has since been known as the Franck-Condon principle. Mention should be made of Professor Franck's courage in following what was morally right. He was one of the first who openly demonstrated against the issue of racial laws in Germany, and he resigned from the University of G?ttingen in 1933 as a personal protest against the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler. Later, in his second homeland, his moral courage was again evident when in 1945 (two months before Hiroshima) he joined with a group of atomic scientists in preparing the so-called "Franck Report" to the War Department, urging an open demonstration of the atomic bomb in some uninhabited locality as an alternative to the military decision to use the weapon without warning in the war against Japan. This report, although failing to attain its main objective, still stands as a monument to the rejection by scientists of the use of science in works of destruction.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Professor Franck received the 1951 Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society, and he was honoured, in 1953, by the university town of G?ttingen, which named him an honorary citizen. In 1955, he received the Rumford Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on photosynthesis, a subject with which he had become increasingly preoccupied during his years in the United States. In 1964, Professor Franck was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, London, for his contribution to the understanding of exchanges of energy in electron collisions, to the interpretation of molecular spectra, and to problems of photosynthesis. Franck was first married (1911) to Ingrid Josefson, of G?teborg, Sweden, and had two daughters, Dagmar and Lisa. Some years after the death of his first wife, he was married (1946) to Hertha Sponer, Professor of Physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina (U.S.A.). Professor Franck died in Germany on May 21, 1964, while visiting in G?ttingen.

free web hits counter

This is my BrainyGoose:
United States, IL, Chicago, English, Italian, Genry, Male, 21-25, bodybulding, swiming.