September 9, 1922 – Birth of Hans Georg Dehmelt, Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the advancement of microphysics

At the age of 10, he began his studies at a Latin school and when he graduated, he voluntarily enlisted in the German army. In 1943, they detected his potential as a scientist and ordered him to enter the University of Breslau (the current Polish city of Wroclaw) to study Physics. However, he is taken prisoner and released three years later.

He continued his studies as a physicist and obtained his doctorate in 1950. In 1952, he emigrated to the United States to carry out a postdoctoral stay at Duke University.

His distinguished career led him to become a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle (United States) and to apply for and obtain American citizenship.

His investigations, focused mainly on the study of the primary components of matter and on the methods of their isolation, allowed the advancement of microphysics, such as, for example, the increase in the precision of the measurements of atomic frequencies and transactions. between atomic energy levels.

In 1973, Dehmelt succeeded in isolating an electron, studying it in depth, and making high-precision measurements of its properties. The great advance lay in the fact that, until then, all classical measurements came from data obtained on millions of electrons at a time, so one could only speak of estimates obtained by averaging.

Advancing in his research, in 1975, Dehmelt managed to cool the particles by reducing their energy in order to measure them with greater precision. These measurements refer to frequencies (quantum leaps), and to the magnetic moment of the electron, a measure of transcendental precision to test certain theories on quantum electronics. In this way, in 1986 he was able to detect a single quantum jump (ie, an excitation level transition) in a barium ion isolated in an electromagnetic trap.

Three years later, Dehmelt concluded that the electron and the positron have exactly the same magnetic moment and, furthermore, as a result of his measurement work, he established a more precise value for the radius of the electron at 10-22 meters, that is, 1,000 times. less than the upper limit previously calculated using particle accelerators.

In 1989, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Americans Norman Foster Ramsey and Wolfgang Paul for their contributions to modern microphysics.

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