Residence United States Citizenship American Education ETH Zurich (1950) | Fields Physicist Name Hans Frauenfelder | |
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Institutions Los Alamos National LaboratoryUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Alma mater Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Other academic advisors Gregor WentzelWolfgang Pauli Books The Physics of Proteins, Subatomic physics, The Mossbauer Effect: A, Nuclear and Particle P, Symmetry Properties of Nuclei Similar People Ernest M Henley, Paul Scherrer, Ben Roy Mottelson, Wolfgang Pauli, Aage Bohr | ||
2 hans frauenfelder at memorial service
Hans Frauenfelder (born June 28, 1922) is a physicist and biophysicist notable for his discovery of perturbed angular correlation (PAC) in 1951. In the modern day, PAC spectroscopy is widely used in the study of condensed matter physics. Within biophysics, he is known for experiment and theory in understanding the dynamical behavior of protein tertiary structure.
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Education
Frauenfelder received his Dr. sc. nat. in physics in 1950 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich under Paul Scherrer, his thesis being on the study of radioactive surfaces. At ETH, he was also taught by Gregor Wentzel and Wolfgang Pauli. Through Pauli, he also got to know many of the leading scientists such as Hendrik Kramers, Werner Heisenberg, Hans Jensen, and Wolfgang Paul.
Career
Frauenfelder migrated to the United States in 1952, joining the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a research associate. He stayed at the UIUC till 1992, ultimately as Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics, Chemistry, and Biophysics.
His research interests included nuclear physics, particle physics, conservation laws, the Mössbauer effect, and the biophysics of protein folding and motions.
In 1992, Frauenfelder moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory where he directed the Center for Nonlinear Studies (CNLS) until 1997. In 1997, he left CNLS and joined the theoretical biology and biophysics group at Los Alamos (T-10 recently renamed T-6) and continues research in biophysics.
Hans Frauenfelder is the inventor of the "Frauenfelder Rules", which provide a guideline about the most successful way to run a seminar at a research workshop, according to which a presentation should take up no more than 66% of the allotted time, the rest being used for questions and in-depth discussion.
Honors
Frauenfelder is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.