Maria Goeppert Mayer

Maria Goeppert Mayer (; June 28, 1906 – February 20, 1972) was a German-born American theoretical physicist, and Nobel laureate in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. She was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, the first being Marie Curie. In 1986, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for early-career women physicists was established in her honor.

A graduate of the University of Göttingen, Goeppert Mayer wrote her doctoral thesis on the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms. At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser in the 1960s later permitted this. Today, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is named the Goeppert Mayer (GM) unit.

Maria Goeppert married Joseph Edward Mayer and moved to the United States, where he was an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. Strict rules against nepotism prevented Johns Hopkins University from taking her on as a faculty member, but she was given a job as an assistant and published a landmark paper on double beta decay in 1935. In 1937, she moved to Columbia University, where she took an unpaid position. During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at Columbia on isotope separation, and with Edward Teller at the Los Alamos Laboratory on the development of thermonuclear weapons.

After the war, Goeppert Mayer became a voluntary associate professor of Physics at the University of Chicago (where her husband and Teller worked) and a senior physicist at the university-run Argonne National Laboratory. She developed a mathematical model for the structure of nuclear shells, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, which she shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner. In 1960, she was appointed full professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.

Early life

Maria Göppert was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland), a Silesian city in Prussia, the only child of paediatrician Friedrich Göppert and his wife Maria née Wolff. In 1910, she moved with her family to Göttingen when her father, a sixth-generation university professor, was appointed as the professor of pediatrics at the University of Göttingen. Goeppert was closer to her father than to her mother. "Well, my father was more interesting", she later explained. "He was after all a scientist".

Göppert was educated at the ''Höhere Technische'' in Göttingen, a school for middle-class girls who aspired to higher education. In 1921, she entered the ''Frauenstudium'', a private high school run by suffragettes that aimed to prepare girls for university. She took the ''abitur'', the university entrance examination, at age 17, a year early, with three or four girls from her school and thirty boys. All the girls passed, but only one of the boys did.

In the Spring of 1924, Göppert entered the University of Göttingen, where she studied mathematics. A purported shortage of women mathematics teachers for schools for girls led to an upsurge of women studying mathematics at a time of high unemployment, and there was even a female professor of mathematics at Göttingen, Emmy Noether, but most were only interested in qualifying for their teaching certificates.

Instead, Goeppert became interested in physics, and chose to pursue a PhD In her 1930 doctoral thesis she worked out the theory of possible two-photon absorption by atoms. Eugene Wigner later described the thesis as "a masterpiece of clarity and concreteness". At the time, the chances of experimentally verifying her thesis seemed remote, but the development of the laser permitted the first experimental verification in 1961 when two-photon-excited fluorescence was detected in a europium-doped crystal. To honor her fundamental contribution to this area, the unit for the two-photon absorption cross section is named the "GM". One GM is 10⁻⁵⁰ cm⁴ s photon⁻¹. Her examiners were three Nobel prize winners: Max Born, James Franck and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus (in 1954, 1925, and 1928, respectively). With Max Born she co-authored some important works on the lattice dynamics of crystals.

On January 19, 1930, Goeppert married Joseph Edward Mayer, an American Rockefeller fellow who was one of James Franck's assistants. The two had met when Mayer had boarded with the Goeppert family. The couple moved to Mayer's home country of the United States, where he had been offered a position as associate professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. They had two children, Maria Ann (who later married Donat Wentzel) and Peter Conrad.

United States

Strict rules against nepotism prevented Johns Hopkins University from hiring Goeppert Mayer as a faculty member. These rules, created at many universities to prevent patronage, had by this time lost their original purpose and were primarily used to prevent the employment of women married to faculty members. She was given a job as an assistant in the physics department working with German correspondence, for which she received a very small salary, a place to work and access to the facilities. She taught some courses, and published an important paper on double beta decay in 1935.

There was little interest in quantum mechanics at Johns Hopkins but Goeppert Mayer worked with Karl Herzfeld in this area. They collaborated on a number of papers, including a paper with Herzfeld's student A.L. Sklar on the spectrum of benzene. She also returned to Göttingen in the summers of 1931, 1932 and 1933 to work with her former examiner Born, writing an article with him for the ''Handbuch der Physik''. This ended when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, and many academics, including Born and Franck, lost their jobs. Concerned by the 1933 anti-Jewish laws that ousted professors of Jewish descent, Goeppert Mayer as well as Herzfeld became involved in refugee relief efforts.

Joe Mayer was fired in 1937. He attributed this to the hatred of women on the part of the dean of physical sciences, which he thought was provoked by Goeppert Mayer's presence in the laboratory. Herzfeld agreed and added that, with Goeppert Mayer, Franck and Herzfeld all at Johns Hopkins, some thought that there were too many German scientists there. There were also complaints from some students that Mayer's chemistry lectures contained too much modern physics. Mayer took up a position at Columbia University, where the chairman of the physics department, George B. Pegram, arranged for Goeppert Mayer to have an office, but she received no salary. She soon made good friends with Harold Urey and Enrico Fermi, who arrived at Columbia in 1939, with the three of them and their families living in nearby Leonia, New Jersey

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