Walter Franz (8 April 1911, in
Munich
Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...
– 16 February 1992, in
Münster
Münster (; nds, Mönster) is an independent city (''Kreisfreie Stadt'') in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. It is also a state di ...
) was a German theoretical
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
who independently discovered the
Franz–Keldysh effect
The Franz–Keldysh effect is a change in optical absorption by a semiconductor when an electric field is applied. The effect is named after the German physicist Walter Franz and Russian physicist Leonid Keldysh.
Karl W. Böer observed first t ...
.
Franz was a student of
Arnold Sommerfeld at the
University of Munich
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...
. He was granted his Ph.D. in 1934. In the preface to the book ''Optik'', Sommerfeld cited him for "the most recent and particularly lucid treatment" of the vectorial generalization of Huygens’ principle.
With
Adolf Kratzer
Adolf (also spelt Adolph or Adolphe, Adolfo and when Latinised Adolphus) is a given name used in German-speaking countries, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Flanders, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America and to a lesser extent in var ...
, another student of Sommerfeld, Franz co-authored the book ''Transzendente Funktionen''. An academic descendant of Franz, Ludwig Tewordt, is cited as having received his Ph.D. at the
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, in 1953.
Walter Franz
– Mathematics Genealogy Project. The article in which Franz independently published the Franz–Keldysh effect
The Franz–Keldysh effect is a change in optical absorption by a semiconductor when an electric field is applied. The effect is named after the German physicist Walter Franz and Russian physicist Leonid Keldysh.
Karl W. Böer observed first t ...
was published in 1958.
Selected bibliography
* Adolf Kratzer
Adolf (also spelt Adolph or Adolphe, Adolfo and when Latinised Adolphus) is a given name used in German-speaking countries, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Flanders, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America and to a lesser extent in var ...
and Walter Franz ''Transzendente Funktionen'' (Akadem. Verl.-Ges. Geest & Portig, 1960)
* W. Franz ''Die Streuung von Strahlung am magnetischen Elektron'', ''Annalen der Physik'' Vol. 425, Issue 8, 689-707 (1938)
* Walter Franz, ''Einfluß eines elektrischen Feldes auf eine optische Absorptionskante'', ''Z. Naturforschung'' 13a 484-489 (1958)
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Franz, Walter
20th-century German physicists
1911 births
1992 deaths
Academic staff of the University of Münster