Gottfried Münzenberg (17 March 1940 – 2 January 2024) was a German physicist.
Life and career
Gottfried Münzenberg was born on 17 March 1940, into a family of Protestant ministers (father Pastor Heinz and mother Helene Münzenberg). All his life he was deeply concerned about the philosophical and theological implications of physics. He studied physics at
Justus-Liebig-Universität in Giessen and
Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck and completed his studies with a Ph.D. at the
University of Giessen, Germany, in 1971.
In 1976, he moved to the department of nuclear chemistry at
GSI in
Darmstadt
Darmstadt () is a city in the States of Germany, state of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Frankfurt Rhine Main Area, Rhine-Main-Area (Frankfurt Metropolitan Region). Darmstadt has around 160,000 inhabitants, making it the ...
, Germany, which was headed by
Peter Armbruster. He played a leading role in the construction of SHIP, the 'Separator of Heavy Ion Reaction Products'. He was the driving force in the discovery of the cold heavy ion fusion and the discovery of the elements
bohrium (''
Z'' = 107),
hassium (''Z'' = 108),
meitnerium (''Z'' = 109),
darmstadtium (''Z'' = 110),
roentgenium (''Z'' = 111), and
copernicium
Copernicium is a synthetic chemical element; it has symbol Cn and atomic number 112. Its known isotopes are extremely radioactive, and have only been created in a laboratory. The most stable known isotope, copernicium-285, has a half-life of ap ...
(''Z'' = 112). In 1984, he became head of the new GSI project, the fragment separator, a project which opened new research topics, such as interactions of relativistic heavy ions with matter, production and separation of exotic nuclear beams and structure of exotic nuclei. He directed the ''Nuclear Structure and Nuclear Chemistry'' department of the GSI and was professor of physics at the
University of Mainz
The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz () is a public research university in Mainz, Rhineland Palatinate, Germany. It has been named after the printer Johannes Gutenberg since 1946. it had approximately 32,000 students enrolled in around 100 a ...
until he retired in March 2005.
Among the rewards he received should be mentioned the Röntgen-Prize of the University of Giessen in 1983 and (together with
Sigurd Hofmann) the
Otto Hahn Prize of the City of Frankfurt am Main in 1996.
Münzenberg died in
Greifswald
Greifswald (), officially the University and Hanseatic City of Greifswald (, Low German: ''Griepswoold'') is the fourth-largest city in the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania after Rostock, Schwerin and Neubrandenburg. In 2021 it surpa ...
on 2 January 2024, at the age of 83.
References
Sources
* Gottfried Münzenberg: "Stigmatisch fokussierendes Teilchenspektrometer mit Massen- und Energiedispersion", Ph.D. thesis, Giessen, 1971
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1940 births
2024 deaths
People from Nordhausen, Thuringia
Scientists from the Province of Saxony
20th-century German physicists
Discoverers of chemical elements
University of Giessen alumni
University of Innsbruck alumni
Academic staff of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
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