Nicholas Kemmer

Nicholas Kemmer
Born	December 9, 1911(1911-12-09) Saint Petersburg Russian Empire
Died	October 21, 1999(1999-10-21) (aged 87) London, United Kingdom
Residence	United Kingdom
Citizenship	British–Russian
Nationality	United Kingdom
Fields	Nuclear physics
Institutions	Tube Alloys Manhattan Project Trinity College, Cambridge Berkeley Radiation Laboratory University of Edinburgh
Alma mater	University of Göttingen University of Zurich Imperial College London
Doctoral students	Abdus Salam
Known for	British nuclear programme Neutron scattering
Notable awards	Hughes Medal (1966), FRS[1]

Nicholas Kemmer (7 December 1911 – 21 October 1998) FRS, was a Russian born British nuclear physicist who played an integral and an edge leading role in United Kingdom's nuclear programme, and was known as a mentor of Abdus Salam – a Nobel laureate in Physics.

Life

Early Life

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 did his doctorate in nuclear physics at the University of Zurich and worked as assistant to Wolfgang Pauli, who had to give strong arguments in 1936 before being allowed to employ a non-Swiss national.^[2] 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 a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1956^[1] and won its Hughes Medal in 1966. 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.

Work and legacy

Duffin–Kemmer–Pitau equation

The Duffin–Kemmer–Pitau 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–Pitau equation is closely linked to the Proca equantions^[3] and the Klein–Gordon equation.^[4] The DKP equation suffers the same drawback as the Klein–Gordon equation in that it calls for negative probabilities.^[4] The equation involves matrices which obey the Duffin–Kemmer–Petiau algebra. The work leading to the DKP equation, culminating in Kemmer's article,^[5] 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.^[6]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Dyson, F. (2011). "Nicholas Kemmer. 7 December 1911 -- 21 October 1998". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2011.0008.  edit
2. ^ Charles P. Enz, Beat Glaus, Gerhard Oberkofler (eds.): Wolfgang Pauli und sein Wirken an der ETH Zürich, vdh Hochschulverlag ETHZ Zürich, 1997, ISBN 3-7281-2317-X, p. 62 (in German language)
3. ^ Sergey Kruglov: Symmetry and electromagnetic interaction of fields with multi-spin. A Volume in Contemporary Fundamental Physics, ISBN 1-56072-880-9, 2000, p. 26
4. ^ ^{a b} Anton Z. Capri: Relativistic quantum mechanics and introduction to quantum field theory, World Scientific, 2002, ISBN 981-238-136-8, p. 25
5. ^ N. Kemmer: The particle aspect of meson theory, Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 10. November 1939, vol. 173, no. 952, pp. 91-116, DOI: 10.1098/rspa.1939.0131
6. ^ Animesh Datta: High-spin field theories and relativistic quantum mechanics of bosons, In Emerson D. Seifer (ed.): Bosons, ferromagnetism and crystal growth research, pp. 119–150, Nova Science Publishers, 2006, ISBN 978-1-60021-367-0, p. 122

External links

• http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0014%2FKEMM

Persondata
Name	Kemmer, Nicholas
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	December 7, 1911
Place of birth	St Petersberg Soviet Union
Date of death	October 21, 1999
Place of death	London, UK