Residence United Kingdom Role Physicist Name Nicholas Kemmer | Nationality United Kingdom Citizenship British–Russian Fields Nuclear physics | |
Born December 9, 1911
Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire ( 1911-12-09 ) Institutions Tube Alloys
Manhattan Project
Trinity College, Cambridge
Berkeley Radiation Laboratory
University of Edinburgh Alma mater University of Gottingen
University of Zurich
Imperial College London Doctoral students Abdus Salam
Paul Taunton Matthews
Richard Dalitz
John Stephen Roy Chisholm Died October 21, 1999, London, United Kingdom Education Imperial College London, University of Zurich, University of Gottingen Awards Max Planck Medal, Hughes Medal Doctoral advisor Wolfgang Pauli, Gregor Wentzel Similar People Abdus Salam, Wolfgang Pauli, Gregor Wentzel, Richard Dalitz, Sheldon Lee Glashow | ||
Freeman dyson being supervised by nicholas kemmer 49 157
Prof Nicholas Kemmer, FRS FRSE (7 December 1911 – 21 October 1998), was a Russian-born nuclear physicist working in Britain, who played an integral and leading edge role in United Kingdom's nuclear programme, and was known as a mentor of Abdus Salam – a Nobel laureate in physics.
Contents
- Freeman dyson being supervised by nicholas kemmer 49 157
- Early life
- British Nuclear development
- Professorship
- DuffinKemmerPetiau equation
- References
Early life
He was the son of Nicholas P. Kemmer and his wife, Barbara Statzer, and was born in Saint Petersburg, his family moved to Germany in 1922, where he was educated at Bismarckschule Hanover and then at the University of Göttingen. He received his doctorate in nuclear physics at the University of Zurich and worked as an assistant to Wolfgang Pauli, who had to give strong arguments in 1936, before being allowed to employ a non-Swiss national. Later on, Kemmer moved to the Beit Fellowship at Imperial College London.
British Nuclear development
He moved to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1940 to work on Tube Alloys, the wartime atomic energy project. In 1940, when Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather showed that a slow neutron reactor fuelled with uranium would in theory produce substantial amounts of plutonium-239 as a by-product, Kemmer (who was lodging at the Bretschers') proposed the names Neptunium for the new element 93 and Plutonium for 94 by analogy with the outer planets Neptune and Pluto beyond Uranus (uranium being element 92). The Americans Edwin M. McMillan and Philip Abelson at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, who had made the same discovery, fortuitously suggested the same names.
Professorship
He spent 1944–1946 in Canada. At the University of Edinburgh from 1953 to 1979, he was Tait Professor of Mathematical Physics, creating the Tait Institute of Mathematical Physics in 1955. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1954. His proposers were Norman Feather, Max Born, Sir Edmund Whittaker and Alexander Aitken. He served as the Society's Vice-President from 1971 to 1974.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1956 and won its Hughes Medal in 1966. Kemmer was awarded the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1975. Nicholas Kemmer was also a mentor and a teacher of the only Pakistani Nobel laureate, Dr. Abdus Salam. Kemmer is credited to trained and work with Salam in Neutron scattering by using relativity equations. Salam later passed his research work to Pakistani physics students who went on to contribute in this field.
Duffin–Kemmer–Petiau equation
The Duffin–Kemmer–Petiau equation (DKP equation, also called Duffin–Kemmer equation or Kemmer equation) plays a role in the description of the standard model of particles, together with the Yang-Mills field. The Duffin–Kemmer–Petiau equation is closely linked to the Proca equation and the Klein–Gordon equation. The DKP equation suffers the same drawback as the Klein–Gordon equation in that it calls for negative probabilities. The equation involves matrices which obey the Duffin–Kemmer–Petiau algebra. The work leading to the DKP equation, culminating in Kemmer's article, has been quoted as "the first attempt at writing down a satisfactory relativistic theory of elementary particles beyond the electron", and these equations have later been brought in unified form with the Dirac equation by Homi J. Bhabha.