Rudolf L. Mossbauer

Rudolf L.
Mossbauer
Year
1961
Subject
Physics
Award
Cresson
Affiliation
California Institute of Technology │ Pasadena, California
Citation
For the discovery of recoilless emission.

Rudolf Ludwig Mossbauer was born in Munich in 1929. He began to study physics at the Technical University (Technische Hochschule) in Munich in 1949 and passed his intermediate degree examinations in 1952. During the years 1953 and 1954 he completed his thesis at the Laboratory for Applied Physics at the Technical University in Munich, at the same time acting as assistant lecturer at its Institute of Mathematics. From 1955 to 1957, he worked on his thesis for the doctorate and carried out a series of investigations at the Institute for Physics of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, in the course of which he carried out the first experimental observation of the phenomenon of recoilless nuclear resonance absorption. In 1958 (the same year he obtained his Ph.D.), he provided the direct experimental evidence of the existence of recoilless nuclear resonance absorption, which became known as the Mossbauer Effect.

In 1960, he accepted a position at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and there continued his investigations of gamma absorption, at first as Research Fellow and later as Senior Research Fellow. He was appointed Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1961.

Information as of 1961