Heinz Maier-Leibnitz

Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (28 March 1911, in Esslingen am Neckar – 16 December 2000, in Allensbach) was a German physicist.

He made contributions to nuclear spectroscopy, coincidence measurement techniques, radioactive tracers for biochemistry and medicine, and neutron optics.

He was an influential educator and an advisor to the Federal Republic of Germany on nuclear programs.

During World War II, Maier-Leibnitz worked at the Institute of Physics of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, in Heidelberg.

After the war, he spent a year working in North America, after which he returned to the Institute of Physics.

He received his doctorate in 1935, from the University of Göttingen, under the Nobel Laureate James Franck and Georg Joos – Franck had emigrated from Germany in 1933 and his successor was Joos.

Maier-Leibnitz was in the field of atomic physics, and he discovered metastable, negative helium ions, which later had applications in particle accelerators.

Shortly after receipt of his doctorate in 1935, Maier-Leibnitz became an assistant to Walther Bothe, Director of the Institut für Physik (Institute for Physics) of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für medizinische Forschung (KWImF, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research), in Heidelberg.

[Note: After World War II, the KWImF was renamed the Max-Planck Institut für medizinische Forschung.

In 1942, he returned to continue his work with Bothe, who, since 1939, had been a principal in the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranverein (Uranium Club).

After World War II, due to the ravages of war and the Allied occupation policies, Bothe's Institute for Physics fell on hard times.

Maier-Leibnitz, Kurt Starke, and other younger colleagues of Bothe left for employment in North America.

Maier-Leibnitz left in the spring of 1947.

When his contract expired in the spring of 1948, he returned to again work for Bothe.

Maier-Leibnitz continued to work on nuclear spectroscopy and radioactive tracers in biochemistry and medicine.

He also took up the study of positron annihilation in solids, which became a new tool for measuring the momentum distribution of bound electrons.

In 1952, he assumed the Chair for Technical Physics and directorship of the Laboratory for Technical Physics at the Technische Hochschule München.

He became a leader in establishing and building centers which used nuclear reactors as neutron sources for research.

The first was the Research Reactor Munich, which was the seed for the entire Garching research campus of the Technische Hochschule München.

The second was the German-French project to construct a high-flux neutron source and found the Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble, France; he was also its first director.

His leadership also helped establish the Physics Department at the Technische Hochschule München.

Maier-Leibnitz was the chairman of a special committee for designing the German Nuclear Program, and thus he was the architect of the first full-scale nuclear program of the Federal Republic of Germany.

He was a signatory of the Göttingen Manifest.

In his honor, the German Research Foundation annually awards six scientists with the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis.

The research reactor Forschungsreaktor München II is officially named Forschungsneutronenquelle Heinz Maier-Leibnitz.

Maier-Leibnitz studied physics at the University of Stuttgart and the University of Göttingen.

In 1952, upon the retirement of Walther Meissner, Maier-Leibnitz assumed the Lehrstuhl für Technische Physik (Chair for Technical Physics) and directorship of the Laboratorium für technische Physik (Laboratory for Technical Physics) at the Technische Hochschule München (in 1970 renamed the Technische Universität München).

This became the nucleus of the Maier-Leibnitz school for nuclear solid state physics.

One of his first major expansions was done with the appointment of Nikolaus Riehl, who had returned to Germany in 1955, after having been taken to the Soviet Union in 1945 to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project.

Riehl was an authority on the purification of uranium, and he greatly contributed to bringing about the construction of a new research tool at the Technische Hochschule München.

Through the initiative and leadership of Maier-Leibnitz, the Forschungsreaktor München (FRM, Research Reactor Munich) was built in Garching bei München; it was the first nuclear reactor built in Germany.

This reactor, popularly called the Atomei (atomic egg), based on its characteristic shape, was built in 1956 and became operational in 1957.

Rather than being used to study reactor physics and technology, the swimming-pool-type reactor was used as a neutron source, and it became a versatile tool for interdisciplinary research.

Furthermore, it was the seed for the entire Garching research campus.

A second reactor built nearby, Forschungsreaktor München II (FRM II, Research Reactor Munich II), went critical for the first time four years after the death of Maier-Leibnitz; it was named the Forschungsneutronenquelle Heinz Maier-Leibnitz in his honor.

In 1958, Bothe's Institut für Physik was spun off and elevated to become the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik (MPIK, Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics).] Bothe had first met Maier-Leibnitz while on a recruiting trip to the University of Göttingen during which Robert Pohl and Georg Joos highly recommended Maier-Leibnitz for his intelligence and creativity.

Maier-Leibnitz arrived at the Institute for Physics shortly after the arrival of Wolfgang Gentner, who became recognized as Bothe's second in command and took Maier-Leibnitz under his wing to become his mentor, critic, and a close friend.

Maier-Leibnitz worked on nuclear spectroscopy, electron-gamma-ray coincidence measurements, radioactive tracers, and energy conservation in Compton scattering.

In the early years of World War II, Maier-Leibnitz first served in the German air defense and then as a meteorologist at air bases in France.

The far-sightedness of Maier-Leibnitz led to reorganization and expansion of physics at the Technische Hochschule München and the formation of the Physics Department in 1965.