Otto Frisch

See also: Frisch

Otto Robert Frisch (October 1st 1904 – September 22nd 1979), Physicist austro - British. With his collaborator Rudolf Peierls, it designed the first theoretical mechanism for the explosion of a atomic bomb in 1940.

Frisch was Juif, born in Vienna in 1904, wire of a painter and a pianist in concert. It was itself gifted artistically but had also inherited his aunt Lise Meitner the love of physics and it began one study period at the university of Vienna, graduate in 1926 for work on the effects of the electron recently discovered on salts. After a few years of work in rather unspecified laboratories in Germany, Frisch obtained a station with Hamburg near the scientist prize winner of the Nobel Prize Otto Stern. It there completed innovative work on the diffraction of the atoms (by using crystalline surfaces) and also proved that the magnetic Moment of the Proton much higher than was supposed before.

The access of Adolf Hitler to the German chancellery in 1933 led Otto Robert Frisch to make the decision to leave to London where it joined the personnel of the Collège Birkbeck and worked with the physicist Patrick Blackett on the technology of the Cloud chamber and the artificial Radioactivité. It prolonged this displacement with a five years mission to Copenhagen with Niels Bohr where it especially specialized in Nuclear physics, and in particular in the neutron physics.

During the holidays of Christmas 1938, it returned visit to his/her aunt Lise Meitner in Kungälv. During its stay, it was informed that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann with Berlin had discovered that the collision of a Neutron with a core of Uranium produced the element Baryum like one of its by-products. Hahn did not manage to explain this result. Frisch and Meitner made the assumption that the uranium core had broken into two, explained the process (in term of excessive electric charge), considered energy released, forged the term fission to describe it and studied the possibility of a chain reaction. The political restrictions of the Nazi time will era forced the team to publish separately. The article of Hahn described the experiment and certified that the atom had fissioned. The article of Meitner and Frisch explained physics at the origin of the phenomenon. Frisch went back to Copenhagen where it was quickly able to isolate the fragments produced by the reactions from fission.

During the summer 1939, Frisch left Denmark for what he thought of being a court travels to Birmingham. But the release of the Second world war prevented its return. Having the war with the spirit, itself and the physicist Rudolf Peierls wrote the Mémorandum of Frisch and Peierls, first document establishing a process by which an atomic explosion could be produced; by using separate Uranium 235 which required only one rather weak critical mass being able to be made critical with conventional explosives and to create an extremely powerful detonation. The memorandum went until predicting the effects of such an explosion - initial deflagration until the radioactive fallout.

This memorandum was the base of British work on the manufacture of an atomic bomb (the project Tube Alloys) and also that of the Projet Manhattan on which Frisch worked like member of the British delegation. It left to the United States in 1943 after being become British citizen in urgency. In 1946, it turned over to England to take the post office of the division of nuclear physics of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, although it also passed a imporante part thirty years following to teach with Cambridge where it was Jacksonian Professor off Natural Philosophy and member of the Trinity College.

It left the pulpit of teaching in 1972 to concentrate on its commercial books and its interests. He died in 1979. He always has of the family in the United States of which Adam Frisch, a former lobbyist in the state of Georgia.

External bonds

Annotated bibliography for Otto Frisch from the Alsos DIGITAL Library for Nuclear Exits
Los Alamos National Laboratory one the British mission

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