Gilbert Jerome Perlow (10 February 1916 – 17 February 2007), was an American physicist famous for his work related to the

Mössbauer effect The Mössbauer effect, or recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence, is a physical phenomenon discovered by Rudolf Mössbauer in 1958. It involves the resonant and recoil-free emission and absorption of gamma radiation by atomic nuclei bound in a ...

, and an editor of the ''

Journal of Applied Physics The ''Journal of Applied Physics'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal with a focus on the physics of modern technology. The journal was originally established in 1931 under the name of ''Physics'', and was published by the American Physical So ...

'' and ''

Applied Physics Letters ''Applied Physics Letters'' is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal that is published by the American Institute of Physics. Its focus is rapid publication and dissemination of new experimental and theoretical papers regarding application ...

''.

Life

Perlow was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

in 1916, and attended

Townsend Harris Hall Townsend Harris Hall Prep School was a public preparatory school located in Manhattan in New York City. History The school is named for Townsend Harris, who besides his many diplomatic accomplishments, had helped found the Free Academy of the ...

. At 16, he went to study medicine at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

. However, he later switched to physics, as he said his talents did not lie in medicine. He obtained his bachelor's degree in 1936 at

. His graduate thesis ''On measurements of L_α satellite x rays'' was supervised by

Floyd K. Richtmyer Floyd Karker Richtmyer (October 12, 1881 – November 7, 1939) was a physicist and educator in the United States. Biography Richtmyer was born October 12, 1881, in the rural community of Cobleskill, New York. He studied with Perley Nutting at C ...

. He obtained his Ph.D from

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

in 1940, where researched nuclear reactions of

lithium-6 Naturally occurring lithium (3Li) is composed of two stable isotopes, lithium-6 and lithium-7, with the latter being far more abundant on Earth. Both of the natural isotopes have an unexpectedly low nuclear binding energy per nucleon ( for lit ...

. There he met his wife Mina Rea Jones, a chemist, when looking for assistance in building lithium targets. After his Ph.D thesis, he left Chicago to work for the

Naval Ordnance Laboratory The Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL) was a facility in the White Oak area of Montgomery County, Maryland. It is now used as the headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Origins The U.S. Navy Mine Unit, later the Mine Laboratory at t ...

and the

US Naval Research Laboratory The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It was founded in 1923 and conducts basic scientific research, applied research, technological ...

, on the detection of submarine using

ultrasound Ultrasound is sound waves with frequency, frequencies higher than the upper audible limit of human hearing range, hearing. Ultrasound is not different from "normal" (audible) sound in its physical properties, except that humans cannot hea ...

s as part of the

war effort In politics and military planning, a war effort is a coordinated mobilization of society's resources—both industrial and human—towards the support of a military force. Depending on the militarization of the culture, the relative size ...

. After the war, he used and modified captured

V-2 The V-2 (german: Vergeltungswaffe 2, lit=Retaliation Weapon 2), with the technical name ''Aggregat 4'' (A-4), was the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was develope ...

rockets to make measurements on

atmospheric An atmosphere () is a layer of gas or layers of gases that envelop a planet, and is held in place by the gravity of the planetary body. A planet retains an atmosphere when the gravity is great and the temperature of the atmosphere is low. A s ...

cosmic rays Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...

, leading him to propose that most gamma rays in the atmosphere were not the cosmic rays themselves, but were rather due to Compton backscattering. In 1952, he became a faculty member at

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

. In 1954, he moved to Illinois to work at the

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory operated by University of Chicago, UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facil ...

, until he retired in 1981. In 1970, he became editor of the ''

'' and ''

''. In the words of John Schiffer and Charles Johnson, Perlow was a "...witty and cultured man, he enjoyed reading, sketching, listening to music, and sailing his yacht on

Lake Michigan Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by volume () and the third-largest by surface area (), after Lake Superior and Lake Huron. To the east, its basin is conjoined with that o ...

Work

Other than his work on

cosmic ray Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...

s, and on the

, Perlow worked on the hyperfine structure of

iron-57 Naturally occurring iron (26Fe) consists of four stable isotopes: 5.845% of 54Fe (possibly radioactive with a half-life over years), 91.754% of 56Fe, 2.119% of 57Fe and 0.286% of 58Fe. There are 24 known radioactive isotopes, the most stable of w ...

and other properties of iron atoms, such as their internal magnetic field.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Perlow, Gilbert Jerome 1916 births 2007 deaths Townsend Harris High School alumni Cornell University alumni University of Chicago alumni 20th-century American physicists American nuclear physicists Particle physicists Scientists from New York (state) Fellows of the American Physical Society