Julius Ashkin

Julius Ashkin (August 23, 1920 – June 4, 1982) was a leader in experimental and theoretical physics known for furthering the evolution of particle physics from nuclear physics.

As a theoretical physicist he made contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics, solid state physics, nuclear physics, and elementary particle physics.

As an experimental physicist his main contributions concerned the passage of certain particles (pi-mesons, or pions) through solid matter and their subsequent decay.

He was recognized for the quality of his research and teaching.

Julius Ashkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 23, 1920.

His parents were Isadore and Anna Ashkin.

He had two younger siblings, a brother, Arthur, also a physicist, and a sister, Ruth.

One older sibling, Gertrude, died while young.

The family home was in Brooklyn, New York, at 983 E 27 Street.

Isadore had immigrated to the United States from Odessa, Ukraine at the age of 19.

Anna, five years younger, also came from the Ukraine (in her case Galicia).

Within a decade of his landing in New York, Isadore had become a U.S. citizen and was running a dental laboratory at 139 Delancey Street in Manhattan.

Ashkin's nickname was Julie.

He is the uncle of the artist Michael Ashkin.

These men included men already mentioned — Fermi, Rabi, Teller, and Bethe — as well as Leó Szilárd (who worked with Fermi to demonstrate that a nuclear reaction was possible), Herbert L. Anderson (then, like Ashkin, a Columbia graduate student), John R. Dunning (an associate professor at Columbia who had built a small cyclotron in the mid-1930s), Walter Zinn (a Columbia professor who worked with the Columbia cyclotron to demonstrate the possibility of a sustained chain reaction), George B. Pegram (Dean of Columbia's Faculties of Political Science, Philosophy, and Pure Science, who helped bring Fermi to the United States and brought him together with representatives of the U.S. Navy Department for the first discussion of the atomic bomb) and Harold Urey (associate professor of chemistry whose work on separation of isotopes resulted in the discovery of deuterium).

In addition, Columbia received visits from scientists at Princeton University who were coordinating their work with Columbia colleagues.

These included John Wheeler, Edward Creutz, and Robert R. Wilson.

Ashkin attended Brooklyn's James Madison High School, graduating in 1936, while still a few weeks shy of his 16th birthday.

In his senior year, he received honors and awards.

He was awarded a scholarship to attend Columbia University, where he studied four years as an undergraduate from 1936 to 1940, and three as a graduate from 1940 to 1943.

Physicists then working on Columbia's faculty in those years included professors Enrico Fermi, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Hans Bethe (visiting), Edward Teller (visiting), and instructors Arnold Nordsieck, Hugh Paxton, and Willis Lamb.

All these men were recognized as among the finest of their generation and four of them — Fermi, Rabi, Bethe, and Lamb — were to be awarded the Nobel Prize.

As an undergraduate, Ashkin was invited to join an honorary mathematics society, and received awards.

He entered the fall semester as an assistant lecturer and began work toward a master's degree.

A year later, having received that degree, he began work toward a Ph.D. under the supervision of Willis Lamb.

As a graduate student, Ashkin contributed to one paper in astrophysics.

and two papers in statistical mechanics He collaborated with Lamb in writing the first of the two papers on statistical mechanics and with Teller in writing the second.

This second paper, "Statistics of Two-Dimensional Lattices with Four Components" has since been frequently cited.

When the process of nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, scientists in many locations in Europe and the United States began intense work to understand and control the phenomenon.

Researchers at Columbia and nearby Princeton University were in the forefront of this work.

There's no information on how much, if at all, Ashkin was involved in the effort at this early stage of his career, but it is certain that the Columbia physics department was the workplace for scientists who were devoted to the secret development of a new and phenomenally powerful weapon.

During the latter part of 1942, before completing his Ph.D. work, Ashkin accepted an offer to work in the Manhattan Project.

Early work on the development of the atom bomb had taken place at Columbia during the six years Ashkin was an undergraduate and graduate student there.

When Ashkin accepted an invitation to join the Manhattan Project he was still working on his Ph.D. He spent the last few months of 1942 at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago and then worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory from mid-1943 to mid-1945.

The scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory, or Met Lab as it was called, used a nuclear reactor called the Chicago Pile to produce the world's first controlled chain reaction.

They built the reactor in a disused squash court under the bleachers of Stagg Field, the university's old football stadium.

They had been brought together from Columbia and Princeton by Arthur Compton who was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago.

The Met Lab consisted of two divisions.

Fermi, Anderson, Zinn, Creutz, and Szilard were key members of the physics division; Bethe and Teller of the theoretical division.

He received his Ph.D. in physics in 1943.