Serge Alexander Korff (June 5, 1906 - December 1, 1989) was a Finnish-born American physicist and a pioneer of cosmic ray research. He invented the wire proportional counter particle detectors.
Serge Alexander Korff (June 5, 1906 - December 1, 1989) was a Finnish-born American physicist and a pioneer of cosmic ray research. He invented the wire proportional counter particle detectors.
Serge Alexander Korff was born at June 5,1906 in Helsinki. His father, baron Serge Alexander Korff was an assistant of Governor-General of Finland, then part of the Russian Empire, [1] and a professor of the Russian law at the University of Helsinki. [2] [3] His mother was an American, a "daughter of a retired Surgeon General and one time President of The American Red Cross". [3] The family moved to the US after the Russian Revolution of 1917. [1] In the United States, his father was on the faculty of Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. [4] Writer Vladimir Nabokov was his cousin. [3]
Korff got a B.A. (1928), M.A. (1929), and Ph.D. (1931) at Princeton University. [1] [3] He was a National Research Fellow at the Mount Wilson Observatory and the California Institute of Technology (1932 - 1935), a Research Fellow of the Bartol Research Foundation of the Franklin Institute (1936 - 1940). Korff joined the Physics Department of New York University in 1941, became a professor in 1945 and retired Emeritus in 1973. [3]
He wrote over 175 papers, a fundamental nuclear instrument treatise, Electron and Nuclear Counters (Van Nostrand, 1946, 1955) and revised a textbook Electron and Nuclear Physics written initially by J. B. Hoag (Van Nostrand, 1948). He also served as a scientific reporter and editor. He developed the wire proportional counter particle detector, that are used for neutron detection. Physicist Willard Libby, who received the 1960 Nobel Prize for radioactive carbon dating, acknowledged his debt to Serge Korff in his Nobel lecture. [3] [5] [2]
In 1940s-1950s, Korff led the teams that monitored cosmic rays using balloons, aircraft and mountaintop observatories. [2] In The New York Times obituary his contributions are described as "observing and mapping the rain of neutrons ... produced by high energy radiation, or cosmic rays, striking the top of the atmosphere all over the earth. Balloon observations were made above Guam, the Galapagos Islands, Greenland, the Caribbean and several points within the United States". [2] He made observations from Peru, Chacaltaya in Bolivia, the Galapagos, Mount Wrangell in Alaska, Greenland, and other areas. [5] [2]
Nobel laureate Frederick Reines worked with Korff as a student. [6]
Korff was married three times: to Alice Graeme (divorced, two daughters Alexandra Scott and Alice Boardman), to Betty Hurd Renshaw (died in 1975), and to Marcella Heron. [5]
He died at December 1, 1989, at home in Manhattan. [2]
He was President of the American Geographical Society (1966-1971), The Explorers Club (1955 - 1958 and 1961- 1963) and the New York Academy of Sciences (1972). [3] [5]
Cosmic rays or astroparticles are high-energy particles or clusters of particles that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own galaxy, and from distant galaxies. Upon impact with Earth's atmosphere, cosmic rays produce showers of secondary particles, some of which reach the surface, although the bulk are deflected off into space by the magnetosphere or the heliosphere.
Johannes Wilhelm "Hans" Geiger was a German physicist. He is best known as the co-inventor of the detector component of the Geiger counter and for the Geiger–Marsden experiment which discovered the atomic nucleus. He also carried the Bothe–Geiger coincidence experiment that confirmed the conservation of energy in light-particle interactions.
Robert Hofstadter was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons".
Frederick Reines was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment. He may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties."
Masatoshi Koshiba was a Japanese physicist and one of the founders of neutrino astronomy. His work with the neutrino detectors Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in detecting solar neutrinos, providing experimental evidence for the solar neutrino problem.
Willard Frank Libby was an American physical chemist noted for his role in the 1949 development of radiocarbon dating, a process which revolutionized archaeology and palaeontology. For his contributions to the team that developed this process, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960.
Luis Walter Alvarez was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for his discovery of resonance states in particle physics using the hydrogen bubble chamber. In 2007 the American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century."
Bruno Benedetto Rossi was an Italian experimental physicist. He made major contributions to particle physics and the study of cosmic rays. A 1927 graduate of the University of Bologna, he became interested in cosmic rays. To study them, he invented an improved electronic coincidence circuit, and travelled to Eritrea to conduct experiments that showed that cosmic ray intensity from the West was significantly larger than that from the East.
The Cowan–Reines neutrino experiment was conducted by physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines in 1956. The experiment confirmed the existence of neutrinos. Neutrinos, subatomic particles with no electric charge and very small mass, had been conjectured to be an essential particle in beta decay processes in the 1930s. With neither mass nor charge, such particles appeared to be impossible to detect. The experiment exploited a huge flux of electron antineutrinos emanating from a nearby nuclear reactor and a detector consisting of large tanks of water. Neutrino interactions with the protons of the water were observed, verifying the existence and basic properties of this particle for the first time.
The Institute for Nuclear Studies was founded September 1945 as part of the University of Chicago with Samuel King Allison as director. On November 20, 1955, it was renamed The Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies. The name was shortened to The Enrico Fermi Institute (EFI) in January 1968.
Bruno Pontecorvo was an Italian and Soviet nuclear physicist, an early assistant of Enrico Fermi and the author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. A convinced communist, he defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on neutrinos. The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in his memory in 1995.
A nuclear emulsion plate is a type of particle detector first used in nuclear and particle physics experiments in the early decades of the 20th century. It is a modified form of photographic plate that can be used to record and investigate fast charged particles like alpha-particles, nucleons, leptons or mesons. After exposing and developing the emulsion, single particle tracks can be observed and measured using a microscope.
Yoji Totsuka was a Japanese physicist and Special University Professor, emeritus, University of Tokyo. A leader in the study of solar and atmospheric neutrinos, he was a scientist and director at Kamioka Observatory, Super-Kamiokande and the High Energy Physics Laboratory (KEK) in Japan.
John Alexander Simpson was an American physicist and science educator. He was deeply committed to educating the public and political leaders about science and its implications, most notably as a principal founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a long-time member of the organizations Board of Sponsors.
Charles Louis Critchfield was an American mathematical physicist. A graduate of George Washington University, where he earned his PhD in physics under the direction of Edward Teller in 1939, he conducted research in ballistics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and received three patents for improved sabot designs.
Edward Purdy Ney was an American physicist who made major contributions to cosmic ray research, atmospheric physics, heliophysics, and infrared astronomy. He was a discoverer of cosmic ray heavy nuclei and of solar proton events. He pioneered the use of high-altitude balloons for scientific investigations and helped to develop procedures and equipment that underlie modern scientific ballooning. He was one of the first researchers to put experiments aboard spacecraft.
Leonidas D. Marinelli was the American radiological physicist who is best known for founding the field of Human Radiobiology and developing the Marinelli Beaker.
Nancy Farley "Nan" Wood was a physicist and businesswoman who was a member of the Manhattan Project. She was the only daughter of Daniel Lee Farley and Minerva Jane Ross, and a lifelong feminist and proponent of the Women's liberation movement as a founding member of the Chicago National Organization for Women. As a business owner, she designed, developed and manufactured her own line of ionizing radiation detectors. During World War II, Wood taught calculus to U.S. Navy sailors in Chicago. Later, during World War II, she was recruited to the Manhattan Project, where she designed and developed ionizing radiation detectors with John Alexander Simpson in the instrument division at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory or Met Lab. In 1949, Wood founded the N. Wood Counter Laboratory.
Takaaki Kajita is a Japanese physicist, known for neutrino experiments at the Kamioka Observatory – Kamiokande and its successor, Super-Kamiokande. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Canadian physicist Arthur B. McDonald. On 1 October 2020, he became the president of the Science Council of Japan.
This article incorporates textfrom this source, which is available under the CC BY 4.0 license.| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
