Rudolf Ludwig Mossbauer
Mössbauer, Rudolf Ludwig (1929-), a German physicist, received the 1961 Nobel Prize in physics for his research on gamma radiation. He shared the prize with American physicist Robert Hofstadter .
Mossbauer was the only son of a photo technician. He completed his early schooling, but his university education was postponed following Germany's defeat in World War II (1939-1945). Mossbauer eventually worked for the United States Army of Occupation and studied at the Technical University in Munich. He completed the equivalent of a B.S. degree in 1952 and continued his studies in Munich.
During the 1950's, at the Institute for Physics of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Mossbauer discovered the effect that was later named for him. Normally, atomic nuclei recoil upon emitting gamma radiation, and the wavelength of the radiation varies with the amount of recoil. Mossbauer discovered that a substance emitting gamma rays could be fixed within the crystal structure of a material in such a way that the nuclei do not recoil, and the radiation then has a precise, predictable wavelength. The “Mossbauer effect” made it possible for scientists to verify some predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity and to measure the magnetic fields of atomic nuclei.
Mossbauer earned his Ph.D. degree in physics at the Technical University in Munich in 1958. In the early 1960's, he was a researcher and professor at the California Institute of Technology. In 1964, he became professor of experimental physics at the Technical University in Munich. From 1972 to 1977, he was director of the Institute Max von Laue in Grenoble, France. In 1977, he returned to the Institute of Technology in Munich. In addition to the Nobel Prize in physics in 1961, Mossbauer received the Mikhail Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1984 and the Einstein Medal in 1986.