Rudolf Peierls

Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, (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 mother died from Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1921, and his father married Else Hermann, the sister-in-law of the playwright Ludwig Fulda.

The family was Jewish, but assimilated, and Peierls and his siblings were baptised as Lutherans.

When he came of age, Peierls left the church.

Peierls commenced school a year late because he needed glasses, and his parents did not trust him not to lose them or break them.

After two years at the local preparatory school, he entered his local gymnasium, the Humboldt-Gymnasium (Berlin-Tegel), where he spent the next nine years, passing his abitur examinations in 1925.

He wanted to study engineering, but his parents, who doubted his practical abilities, suggested physics instead.

He entered the University of Berlin, where he listened to lectures by Max Planck, Walther Bothe and Walther Nernst.

Fellow students included Kurt Hirsch and Käte Sperling.

The physics laboratory classes were overcrowded, so the first year students were encouraged to take theoretical physics courses instead.

Peierls found that he liked the subject.

In 1926 Peierls decided to transfer to the University of Munich where Arnold Sommerfeld, who was considered to be the greatest teacher of theoretical physics.

Fellow students there included Hans Bethe, Hermann Brück and William V. Houston.

At the time, the Bohr-Sommerfeld theory was being overturned by the new quantum mechanics of Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac.

On his advice, Peierls moved to the University of Leipzig, where Heisenberg had been appointed to a chair in 1927.

Heisenberg set Peierls a research project on ferromagnetism.

It was known that this was caused by the spin of the electrons in the metal aligning; but the reason for this was unknown.

Heisenberg suspected that it was caused by a quantum mechanical effect, caused by the Pauli exclusion principle.

Peierls was unable to develop the theory, but work on Hall effect was more productive.

The anomalous Hall effect could not be explained with the classical theory of metals, and Heisenberg sensed an opportunity to demonstrate that quantum mechanics could explain it.

Peierls was able to do so, resulting in his first published paper.

In 1928, Sommerfeld set off on a world tour.

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.

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.

Rudolf Ernst Peierls was born in the Berlin suburb of Oberschöneweide, the youngest of three children of Heinrich Peierls an electrical engineer, from a family of Jewish merchants.

His father was the managing director of a cable factory of Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), and his mother was his father's first wife, Elisabeth ( Weigert).

Rudolf had an older brother, Alfred, and an older sister, Annie.

His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".

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.