Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim

He obtained his PhD in 1923, under the supervision of Max Born in the University of Göttingen.[2][3] He also worked with Edward Teller on the muon, sparkling his interest in cosmic rays.[3]

As a "physical assistant" to David Hilbert (like his teacher Born before him), he worked with him John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner on the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics in 1928.[4]

He wrote extensive articles[5] for the Lehrbuch der Physik by J.H.J. Müller and Claude Pouillet on the quantum theory of magnetism and the conduction phenomena in metals.[2][3] During the same period was the holder of a Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellowship, a Lorentz Fellowship.[3] He lectured at Göttingen and was also a visiting professor at the University of Moscow.[2][3]

In the early 1930s he got interested in Fermi's theory of beta decay and worked with Hans Bethe on meson decay.[3]

Upon his immigration to the United States in 1934 Nordheim served as a visiting professor at Purdue University, working on cosmic rays, moving on to a permanent faculty position at Duke University in 1937.

He married German physicist Gertrud Pöschl in 1935, and together worked on structure and spectra of polyatomic molecules.[2]

During the World War II, he worked as a member of the Manhattan Project as head of department in the Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge and from 1945 to 1947 head of the physics department there.[2]

His wife died in accident during a stay in Germany in 1935, Nordheim was deeply affected.[3] He later decided to move to California. In 1956 he became a scientist at the John L. Hopkins Laboratory of Pure and Applied Science of General Atomics in San Diego and later chairman of the theoretical physics department.[2] There he mainly dealt with the physics of nuclear reactors and neutron physics.[2][3] In the early 1950s, however, he also made early contributions to the nuclear shell model with Maria Goeppert Mayer.[6][3]

He was elected in 1936 a Fellow of the American Physical Society.[7] In 1951 he received the honorary degree of Doctor in Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and 1963 from Purdue University.[3] He was also the first to give the Fritz London Memorial Lecture at Duke University in 1956.[3]

An important contribution, with the British physicist Ralph H. Fowler in 1928,[8] was to establish the correct physical explanation of the physical phenomenon now called field electron emission. They established that electron emission occurred by a form of wave-mechanical tunneling, now called Fowler–Nordheim tunneling, and, with the help of the assumption that electrons in metals obeyed Fermi-Dirac statistics, derived an (approximate) emission equation. Over time, this equation has been developed into a family of approximate equations (offering different degrees of approximation to reality, when describing field emission from bulk metals), known as Fowler–Nordheim-type equations.

Fowler-Nordheim tunneling was the first effect in physics to be firmly identified as due to wave-mechanical tunneling, in the early days of quantum mechanics. The original Fowler-Nordheim-type equation was one of the first to use Fermi-Dirac statistics to explain an experimental phenomenon involving electrons in metals, and its success greatly helped to establish modern electron band theory.[9] The Fowler-Nordheim paper also established the physical basis for a unified treatment of field-induced and thermally induced electron emission.[9]

The ideas of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Fowler and Nordheim were also an important stimulus to the development, by George Gamow,[10] and Ronald W. Gurney and Edward Condon,[11][12] later in 1928, for the theory of the radioactive decay of nuclei (by alpha particle tunneling).[13]