Rudolf Peierls

Rudolf Peierls
Peierls in 1966
Born
Rudolf Ernst Peierls

5 June 1907
Died19 September 1995 (1995-09-20) (aged 88)
CitizenshipGerman (1907–1940)
British (1940–1995)
Alma materUniversity of Berlin
University of Munich
University of Leipzig
University of Manchester
St John's College, Cambridge
Known forPeierls argument
Peierls bracket
Peierls droplets
Peierls substitution
Peierls stress
Peierls transition
Landau–Peierls instability
Peierls–Bogoliubov inequality
Peierls–Nabarro potential
Bohr–Peierls–Placzek relation
Frisch–Peierls memorandum
Charge density wave theory
Umklapp process
Tube Alloys project
AwardsCommander of the Order
of the British Empire
(1946)
Medal of Freedom (1946)
Royal Medal (1959)
Lorentz Medal (1962)
Max Planck Medal (1963)
Knight Bachelor (1968)
Enrico Fermi Award (1980)
Matteucci Medal (1982)
Copley Medal (1986)
Scientific career
FieldsPhysicist
InstitutionsUniversity of Manchester
University of Cambridge
University of Birmingham
New College, Oxford
University of Washington
Manhattan project
Thesis Zur kinetischen Theorie der Wärmeleitung in Kristallen  (1929)
Doctoral advisorWerner Heisenberg
Other academic advisorsWolfgang Pauli
Doctoral studentsFred Hoyle
E. E. Salpeter
Gerald E. Brown
Stuart T. Butler
Walter Marshall
James S. Langer
John Stewart Bell
Stanley Mandelstam
Other notable studentsN. M. Butt
M. A. Beg

Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, CBE FRS (/ˈp.ərlz/; German: [ˈpaɪɐls]; 5 June 1907 – 19 September 1995) was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".[1]

Peierls studied physics at the University of Berlin, at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld, the University of Leipzig under Werner Heisenberg, and ETH Zurich under Wolfgang Pauli. After receiving his DPhil from Leipzig in 1929, he became an assistant to Pauli in Zurich. In 1932, he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, which he used to study in Rome under Enrico Fermi, and then at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge under Ralph H. Fowler. Because of his Jewish background, he elected to not return home after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, but to remain in Britain, where he worked with Hans Bethe at the Victoria University of Manchester, then at the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge. In 1937, Mark Oliphant, the newly appointed Australian professor of physics at the University of Birmingham recruited him for a new chair there in applied mathematics.

In March 1940, Peierls co-authored the Frisch–Peierls memorandum with Otto Robert Frisch. This short paper was the first to set out that one could construct an atomic bomb from a small amount of fissile uranium-235. Until then it had been assumed that such a bomb would require many tons of uranium, and consequently was impractical to build and use. The paper was pivotal in igniting the interest of first the British and later the American authorities in nuclear weapons. He was also responsible for the recruitment of his compatriot Klaus Fuchs to work on Tube Alloys, as the British nuclear weapons project was called, which resulted in Peierls falling under suspicion when Fuchs was exposed as a spy for the Soviet Union in 1950.

After the war, Peierls returned to the University of Birmingham, where he worked until 1963, and then was the Wykeham Professor of Physics and a Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford until he retired in 1974.[2] At Birmingham he worked on nuclear forces, scattering, quantum field theories, collective motion in nuclei, transport theory and statistical mechanics, and was a consultant to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. He received many awards, including a knighthood in 1968, and wrote several books including Quantum Theory of Solids, The Laws of Nature (1955), Surprises in Theoretical Physics (1979), More Surprises in Theoretical Physics (1991) and an autobiography, Bird of Passage (1985). Concerned with the nuclear weapons he had helped to unleash, he worked on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was President of the Atomic Scientists' Association in the UK, and was involved in the Pugwash movement.

  1. ^ Edwards, S. (1996). "Rudolph E. Peierls". Physics Today. 49 (2): 74–75. Bibcode:1996PhT....49b..74E. doi:10.1063/1.2807521.
  2. ^ Cathcart, Brian (21 September 1995). "Obituary: Sir Rudolf Peierls". The Independent. Retrieved 24 April 2023.

Developed by StudentB