Otto Frisch, Austrian-British Physicist

Frisch playing the piano at the British Mission Party, September 22nd, 1945. Otto Robert Frisch (October 1, 1904 - September 22, 1979) was a Jewish Austrian-British physicist who, with his collaborator Rudolf Peierls, designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940. He obtained a position in the Otto Stern laboratory where he produced novel work on the diffraction of atoms (using crystal surfaces) and also proved that the magnetic moment of the proton was much larger than had been previously supposed. The rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933 made Frisch make the decision to move to London where he worked on cloud chamber technology and artificial radioactivity. He followed this with a five year stint in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr where he increasingly specialized in nuclear physics, particularly in neutron physics. With the outbreak of World War II he and Rudolf Peierls produced the Frisch-Peierls memorandum, which was the first document to set out a process by which an atomic explosion could be generated and went on to predict the effects of such an explosion from the initial blast to the resulting fallout. This memorandum was the basis of British work on building an atomic device (the Tube Alloys project) and also that of the Manhattan Project on which Frisch worked as part of the British delegation. He went to America in 1943 having been hurriedly made a British citizen. At Los Alamos, one of Frisch's tasks was to accurately determine the exact amount of enriched uranium which would be required to create the critical mass, the mass of uranium which would sustain a nuclear reaction. In 1946 he returned to England to take up the post of head of the nuclear physics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment and also spent much of the next thirty years teaching at Cambridge. He retired from the chair in 1972 as required by University regulations and died in 1979 at the age of 74

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A Bomb A-bomb Alamos Atom Atomic Austrian-born Detonation Frisch Lanl Memorandum

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