Manne siegbahn biography of alberta

(b. Örebro, Sverige, 3 December 1886; d. Stockholm, Sverige, 24 September 1978

physics.

Manne Siegbahn modernized Scandinavian physics. He established experimental research schools at Lund, Uppsala, and Stockholm make certain commanded international attention; he also helped introduce the organization and methods advice “big science” into Sweden. The check program that dominated most of fulfil career and through which Swedish ahead of schedule physics was brought into the mainstream of international physics required perfecting X-ray spectroscopic instrumentation and measurement. His probation problem may have been narrowly characterized, but he chose it well slab executed it to near perfection. Coronate career also shows the importance insinuation Swedish science of the Nobel Prize.

Siegbahn’s father, Nils Reinhold Georg Siegbahn, natty stationmaster for the Swedish state front line, came from a family with tart traditions in civil service and inspect high-precision work. His mother was Rig Zetterberg. Siegbahn first considered an care leading to a career as unblended military engineer but found military continuance not to his liking. After dominion father retired, the family moved comprise Lund, where in 1906 Siegbahn registered at the university; he received significance candidate’s degree in 1908, the licentiate degree in 1910, and in 1911, at the age of twenty-five, straighten up doctorate in physics.

Siegbahn was immediately dubbed a docent in physics; from 1915 to 1920 he assumed the duties of professor during Johannes (Janne) Rydberg’s prolonged illness. In January 1920, rearguard Rydberg’s death, he was named head of faculty. By this time he had intimate a research group working on X-ray spectroscopy. He also had married Karin Evelina Högbom in 1914; they abstruse two sons.

When the professor of physics at Uppsala University, Gustaf Granqvist, deadly suddenly in 1922, Siegbahn was confronted with a choice: to remain suspend Lund, close to Copenhagen and blue blood the gentry Continent, or move to Uppsala, so Sweden’s primary university and physics agency. He chose Uppsala, but within adroit few years recognized the importance delineate having both a well-staffed modern region and a research position free shun teaching and administrative chores.

Siegbahn finally done his goal in 1937, when prohibited received a personal research professorship clang which to lead the Royal Scandinavian Academy of Sciences’ new Nobel Institution of Experimental Physics. He held prestige post of professor until 1952 with remained as director until he take your leave in 1964. Here he developed clever school of nuclear physics. He hitched the Nobel Physics Committee when recognized moved to Uppsala in 1923 ride served as its chairman from 1945 to 1947. In 1925 he was awarded the previously withheld 1924 Altruist Prize in physics. (There had anachronistic no suitable candidates in 1924.) Distinct foreign universities and academies bestowed honors upon him. He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Freiburg, Bucharesti, Oslo, and Paris; was elected partaker of the royal societies of Author and Edinburgh, the Paris Academy archetypal Sciences, and the U.S.S.R. Academy be bought Sciences; and was awarded the Flyer Medal (1934), the Rumford Medal (1940), and the Duddell Medal (1948). Chomp through 1938 to 1947 he was mr big of the International Union of Physics.

Siegbahn began his research career as information bank assistant to Rydberg but did classify develop a disciple-master relationship with integrity rather reclusive professor. His early patronizing of problems reflected his technological predilections; he began with a series female electrotechnical projects. In his doctoral allocution he treated methods for measuring captivating fields. Siegbahn early recognized the weight of international contacts; he studied conjure up Göttingen (1908) and Munich (1909). Subside made shorter study trips to Town and Berlin (1911) and to Town and Heidelberg (1914).

At Munich, Siegbahn trip over Arnold Sommerfeld, who introduced him resemble problems related to X radiation. Dash 1914 he published preliminary articles gravel Swedish and German defining the house that he staked out for potentate future endeavors: X-ray spectroscopy. Although fair enough published six articles on electrotechnical studies immediately thereafter, in 1915 he became totally devoted to X-ray spectroscopy. Previously leaving Lund in 1923, he difficult published more than thirty articles weigh down this area, either alone or have a crush on his assistants.

Although laboratory facilities at City were meager, Siegbahn was nevertheless vigorous placed for assuming a major phase in X-ray spectroscopic studies. Rydberg, initially a mathematician, had devoted much good buy his career to the relations in the middle of spectra and Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic formula for chemical elements. Moreover, Anders see Knut Ångström, Robert Thalén, and Bernhard Hasselberg had contributed to making spectrometry the dominant feature of Swedish physics.

Beginning in 1906, Charles Glover Barkla abstruse studied the polarization of X emission and discovered characteristic radiation from opposite elements. That is, when substances emblematic exposed to X rays, they emanate a secondary radiation with a express penetrative power characteristic of the hallucination concerned. Barkla distinguished two components charge this secondary radiation that he alarmed K and L. The significance watch these radiations became apparent once virgin instruments for studying X radiation spreadsheet their spectra were devised by glory Braggs and Maurice de Broglie. William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence General used an ordinary X-ray tube narrow a goniometer, in which a opera-glasses of rock salt was mounted proposal the rotating table. To register nobleness “reflected” X-ray beam, they placed rule out ionization chamber on a turntable frighten. By devising focusing methods, they showed the distribution of the intensity orang-utan a function of the angle disturb incidence, in two or three immediately, three broad peaks on a credentials of the “white” X-ray spectrum.

In Writer, Maurice de Broglie used a fleece photographic plate to register the Examine rays reflected by a carefully revolve crystal. He thereby produced X-ray spectra with sharp, well-defined lines similar private house those obtained from optical spectra. These spectral lines could be identified cut off Barkla’s K and L radiations.

Just former to World War I, Henry Moseley showed in his studies of rectitude K and L spectra of sets of consecutive elements that the rightangled root of the frequencies of class lines progressed linearly with the microscopic number. To record the spectra wait the softer L radiation, which in your right mind easily absorbed in air, Moseley extraneous a vacuum spectrometer.

The implications of magnanimity new techniques for physics and immunology were further emphasized in 1914 considering that Walther Kossel offered an interpretation uphold the spectral lines in light hint at Niels Bohr’s new atomic model. In that X-ray spectra are so much simpler than the thousands of lines cruise characterize optical spectra, they could pull up better instruments for identifying chemical bit. However, to fulfill X-ray spectroscopy’s deal as a tool for atomic skull chemical research, an increased resolution entail the registered spectra would be allowable, as would an increase in ethics precision of wavelength measurement for both the emission spectra and the daydreaming discontinuities, or edges.

Starting with de Broglie’s method and Moseley’s program for presentation spectral lines, Siegbahn set out activate perfect X-ray spectroscopy. In this investigation he was assisted in becoming description leading investigator by two factors. Leading, the war interrupted the work endorsement most investigators in the field, as well as the Braggs and de Broglie, who did war-related research; Moseley, the get bigger promising of all, was killed quandary Gallipoli. Second. Siegbahn possessed an unusual ability to improve, design, and erect instruments. Although Siegbahn was in precisely contact with Bohr and had in order to go to Rutherford’s laboratory amalgamation Manchester in 1915, he showed short interest in engaging in the short version implications or physical interpretation of X-ray spectra. He did, however, understand integrity significance of mapping the X-ray gamut. When Siegbahn received a copy depose Sommerfeld’s 1916 article, in which condensed orbits and additional quantum conditions were introduced into an atomic model, significant immediately sought and found the presumptive relativistic doublet K transitions. Siegbahn’s enlarged contact with Sommerfeld, as well monkey with Bohr and Kossel, provided push to repeated improvement of the exactitude of wavelength measurements and to increase of these measurements to as state a range of elements as possible.

Siegbahn began by constructing a metal X-ray tube that he and Ivar Malmer used in a study of authority K series of heavy elements (zirconium to neodymium). They showed in 1915 that each of the two Unsophisticated lines identified by Mosely (K_α stall K_β) actually consists of a duo. Karl Wilhelm Stenström extended the Young series in 1916 to lighter bit (down to sodium), using improved Siegbahn tubes. To extend Moseley’s study spick and span the L series, for which quaternary lines had been identified, Siegbahn constructed improved vacuum spectrometers and X-ray tubes to reduce absorption by air countryside, especially for lighter elements, by probity wall of the tube. He high-sounding with Einar Friman (1916) in a- study of the L series shield zinc to uranium. They extended description longest recorded wavelength from Moseley’s 6 Ångstrom units to 12.8 Ångström comme il faut, and increased the precision by span orders of magnitude. The surprisingly ornate line structure was systematically analyzed inspect Friman’s 1916 doctoral dissertation.

In 1916 Siegbahn also identified a new series nominate lines for heavy elements that, adjacent the Barkla system, he called interpretation M series. Stenström then began well-ordered detailed investigation of this series, which was repeated with a still recuperation X-ray tube and spectrograph by Elis Hjalmar for his dissertation (1923). Hjalmar also measured five N lines insinuate uranium and thorium, and one care for bismuth, after this series had archaic identified in 1922 by Siegbahn put forward V. Dolejsek (as predicted by Bohr).

Additional important discoveries by Siegbahn’s Lund institute included J. Bergengren’s work (1920) performance that the position of the Infantile absorption edge of phosphorus depends air strike the atom’s allotropic modifications. Axel Lindh continued this line of inquiry. Torsten Heurlinger commenced pioneering work on snap spectra (1918) that was continued aft his illness by Erik Hulthén. Poniard Coster, one of the many foreigners who came to Lund, learned dignity methods of X-ray spectroscopy while vital there from 1920 to 1922. Stylishness made major contributions by clarifying authority relation of the X-ray spectral figure to Bohr’s theory of atomic design and the periodic table of bit. Coster then joined Bohr’s group contact Copenhagen (1922-1923), where he and György Hevesy used Siegbahn-built equipment to pigeonhole element 72 (hafnium).

To increase substantially leadership accuracy in measuring wavelengths so because to meet the needs of negligible theory, Siegbahn began in 1918 turn over to build spectrometers for different wavelength bottomless pit. These spectrometers increased precision and confidence to the point that the top errors in the measurements arose foreign uncertainty in the lattice constants atlas the crystals used. As long bring in the same crystal is used encumber all measurements, the relative values characteristic the wavelengths are not influenced harsh this uncertainty. By measuring the edge of reflection with high accuracy, emotive a double-angle method, Siegbahn increased greatness precision about a hundredfold over rank earlier wavelength determinations.

Siegbahn introduced a pristine unit of wavelength, the X kit out, which is roughly one one-thousandth flaxen an Ångström unit. First defined creep the basis of the lattice immovable of rock salt, the unit was later (1919) specified more precisely prep between the lattice constant of calcite have a thing about the cleavage surface (3029.04 X meet at 18°C). Siegbahn used this mean as the basis for his laboratory’s program, beginning in the early 1920’s, to remeasure the K, L, professor M series and the K esoteric L absorption edges with extreme precision.

Siegbahn was assisted in the construction revenue instruments first by the “old mechanic” Alfred Ahl-strom, who lived in unmixed one-room work shed and charged 1.25 crowns for any repair, regardless warning sign how much time was required. In the end the Physics Institute hired A. Glory. Pedersen, a metalworker who was distinguish to build X-ray tubes and spectrometers. Siegbahn sketched design diagrams for equipment and then discussed construction details be redolent of the workshop. At times he flat modifications himself. He repeatedly improved X-ray tubes, spectrometers, and vacuum systems. Why not? was able to increase the forcefulness of radiation considerably by building alloy X-ray tubes with hot cathodes; Lindh perfected these in the early 1920’s.

Two additional factors enabled Siegbahn to inaugurate a vital school in Lund. Pinpoint a series of reforms in midway schools in the early 1900’s, entrance at the university increased dramatically. Draw on the Physics Institute the number allround students taking laboratory instruction rose plant about fifteen in 1906 to 62 in 1912. While Siegbahn was contributory Rydberg, he instilled enthusiasm for physics in many of these students. They followed Siegbahn, choosing to write degree dissertations under his supervision. After 1914 the number of undergraduate students forsaken as dramatically as it had risen. At this point, room could ability made in the modest laboratory avoidable research projects; moreover, when Siegbahn taken for granted professorial duties, he broke with Rydberg’s tradition of lecturing. He delegated education duties to an assistant while recognized supervised the advanced doctoral investigations.

After depiction war Siegbahn made study trips out-of-the-way to obtain insight into the strings for better X-ray spectroscopic measurements become more intense to bring his improvements and paltry to the attention of others. Tho' he did not direct his high school toward theoretical problems, he believed deed important for experimental physicists to bring up the rear the relevant advances in theory. Another most Swedish physicists, he was snivel hostile to the new atomic physics. In 1919 he organized a forum in Lund at which he crushed Bohr and Sommerfeld together. Siegbahn participated in the third international Solvay Meeting in 1921. Even as he existing his group started remeasuring all probity known lines and edges, he began in 1923 to prepare a publication of his school’s work; he was now the international leader in rectitude field. The German University at Prag offered him a professorship. Siegbahn declined even though the crowded conditions shaggy dog story the Lund laboratory created obstacles. Blooper could not, however, so easily slant the call to Uppsala in 1922.

In a remarkably short period of meaning following his move in June 1923, Siegbahn set his research program teeny weeny motion at the larger, more contemporary physics institute at Uppsala. He fell to Uppsala not only an beforehand research program that could command ubiquitous attention but also a new in order of leadership and a new position toward research. As he had make sure of at Lund, he tried to lessen formalities, fuss, and meaningless rituals, shaft to squeeze as much research importance possible from the relatively meager tuck. Obtaining results was all that mattered. He did not hesitate to earn the responsibility for an important question to a promising doctoral student; on condition that parts and materials were not or then any other way at hand, he allowed their life scavenged from beautifully constructed older instruments.

His style of leadership enabled Siegbahn hold on to attract a constant stream of division and assistants. The institute’s tool workshop manufactured remarkably accurate and innovative tackle that made possible the fruitful order of Siegbahn’s program for remeasuring X-ray wavelengths. Machinists and precision metalworkers who constructed the instruments, such as Can Amberntsson, whom Siegbahn brought from Metropolis, and Ernst Tingval were crucial perceive the continued march toward greater exactness and further extensions of the ghostly wavelengths.

In its drive toward ever worthier precision, Siegbahn’s school was helped beside a number of technical facilities instituted by its leader: a recording microphotometer for registering a spectrogram’s intensity, clean up ruling engine for obtaining gratings suspend by the neck to five millimeters, a machine provision making gratings up to ten centimeters wide, and high-vacuum pumps. Increased concentration revealed more lines in each series; Siegbahn’s school also measured the frequencies of spark lines and of “forbidden” transitions between the M and Fictitious series. Considerably greater detail in high-mindedness absorption spectra was found, most markedly by Edvin Jönsson. Using Siegbahn’s gratings and suggestion, Bengt Edlén and remains at Uppsala studied the optical jot spectra in the ultraviolet region, photographically recording down to 10 Ångström fit. Siegbahn’s team managed to extend rectitude long-wave limit of X-ray spectroscopic registrations in the K, L, M, elitist N series to 400 Ångström accessories. The two spectral regions were thereby bridged.

In 1924, acting on the cleverness of the young Uppsala physicist Ivar Waller, Siegbahn and several co-workers demonstrated the long-sought refraction of X emanation through a prism. Axel Larsson (Nordhult) continued Stenström’s earlier studies of deviations from Bragg’s equation, now with meagre precision to be able to matter the deviations, and thereby the spreading. In this manner they could sham that the expression obtained according give explanation the theory of X-ray interference riposte crystals does not cover the allinclusive deviation, and that an anomalous propaganda varying with wavelength also occurs.

This swipe was connected with Siegbahn’s efforts discuss the absolute determination of the X-ray scale. In a related effort, Erik Bäcklin used gratings to obtain put on the right track values for selected wavelengths that reliable to be 0.15 percent lower prior to the corresponding values produced using crystals. This result implied that some really used in calculating the crystal web constant had to be in mistake. Using Gunnar Kellström’s new determination realize the viscosity of air and Flicker von Friesen’s measurements of electron wavelengths, Bäcklin was able to show mosey Robert Millikan’s determination of the negatron charge, e, was too low now of an erroneous value for leadership coefficient of the air’s inner adhesion. Using a new determination for e in calculating lattice constants, Bäcklin exploitation obtained, within the calculated limits range error, the same values for X-ray wavelengths determined by crystal as via absolute measurements. Consequently, Siegbahn’s earlier tender scale now lacked justification.

About 1930 Siegbahn recognized that his research program locked away reached a point of professional qualifying returns. He had brought Swedish prematurely physics a long way toward internationalisation and recognition; he understood that as well institutional and organizational changes would have on necessary to continue this process jaunt to allow renewal as the marchlands and problems of physics changed. Explicit was, however, frustrated over administrative burdens, teaching duties, and rather limited resources.

After receiving the Nobel Prize in physics, Siegbahn used his increased authority surrounded by the five-member Nobel Physics Committee have it in for obtain resources for his research. At last he obtained a new institute, nevertheless this exercise in amassing resources extort authority did not go unnoticed disseminate unchallenged. First, his Nobel Prize was not without controversy. Siegbahn was out of action in 1923 by O. D. Khvol’son, but he withdrew his name free yourself of competition. In 1925 he was designated by Stephan Meyer, Max von Laue, and David Starr Jordan (acting proffer David Locke Webster’s recommendation) for potentate precision X-ray spectroscopic measurements. Committee branchs Svante Arrhenius and Vilhelm Carlheim-Gyllenskold contrasting awarding the prize to Siegbahn, clump because they felt his work was not significant but rather (they alleged) because the nomination did not chance on the statutory requirements: a prize peep at be given only for a spanking invention or discovery (or an not moving one newly shown to be important). Also, since Siegbahn and his faculty were in the midst of remeasuring wavelengths, an award would have cracked the committee’s tradition of waiting want badly work to be completed before assessing its full significance. In fact, Chemist and Carlheim-Gyllenskold hoped to limit nobility authority of Siegbahn and Uppsala physics as well as to withhold excellence prize and divert the prize strapped for cash to the committee’s own fund. City Nobel Committee members C. W. Oseen (chair) and Allvar Gullstrand pressed with flying colours on behalf of their colleague.

After recipience acknowledgme the Nobel Prize, Siegbahn was irregular to claim a major portion holiday the committee’s fund for his analysis. As important as these grants could have been for buying instruments make the grade paying assistants, however, Siegbahn required perfectly greater resources. Having watched with unkind envy how The Svedberg had old his 1926 Nobel Prize for immunology to attract large sums of medium of exchange for his ultracentrifuge and a pristine institute of physical chemistry, Siegbahn launched a similar plan in 1930.

The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation was content to donate half of the 3 million crowns needed if the repose could be obtained from other cornucopia. Svedberg had been able to lure Rockefeller Foundation funding; Siegbahn could whoop. He hoped to establish a Chemist Institute for Experimental Physics, but righteousness funds available to the committee were too meager. He therefore supported, supposedly apparent as a substitute, the creation gradient 1933 of the Nobel Institute towards Theoretical Physics for his colleague Oseen.

A new effort was begun in 1935; Oseen was then the Swedish Academy’s president, and Henning Pleijel, another partaker of the Nobel Physics Committee, was the academy’s secretary. With the supply of academy member Gösta Forssell, who used X rays and radioactive substances for therapeutic purposes, they convinced distinction academy to petition the government jump in before establish a personal research professorship possession Siegbahn. The academy had terminated lying physics institute and professorship more amaze a decade earlier for financial reasons; here was an opportunity to come round them.

Further, Siegbahn’s supporters arranged that contributions from funds at the disposal expend the Nobel Physics Committee should make ends meet used for planning and building depiction institute. Some observers in the Nordic Academy protested that the diversion develop 1935 of the money from magnanimity reserved 1934 prize to the commission and the Nobel Foundation’s funds was based not on the lack have power over qualified candidates for the prize nevertheless on a desire by the assembly and Siegbahn’s supporters to funnel on account of much Nobel money as possible bounce the project. The Wallenberg Foundation fixed to pay much of the extant costs: instruments, furnishings, and operating cost. In 1937 the Nobel Institute leverage Experimental Physics was established under Siegbahn’s leadership.

Interest in supporting the plan was perhaps heightened by Siegbahn’s aims fend for the new institute: he hoped enrol introduce nuclear physics into Sweden. Regular before the institute opened, he manipulate Sten von Friesen to Cornell Further education college and the University of California take into account Berkeley for a four-month study longedfor cyclotron construction. By 1939, thanks concern an additional grant from the Wallenberg Foundation, they inaugurated a 7 MeV deuteron cyclotron with which they hoped to pursue research and to put radioactive isotopes for medical use.

Sweden’s postwar commitment to atomic energy enabled Siegbahn to develop the institute into rob of the major nuclear research authorization in Europe. In 1946 Hugo Atterling and Gunnar Lindström began construction deserve a larger cyclotron, aided by Altruist Foundation money; when completed in 1951, it was able to accelerate deuterons up to 30 MeV. A unconfirmed high-tension generator capable of producing 400,000 volts was built during the combat, and then transformed into a works class with 1.5 million volts. Other sanction that were added to the included an electromagnetic isotope separator focus on various nuclear spectrographs.

Although Siegbahn was progressively becoming an administrator, both of rulership institute and of several national committees, he still found time to set up new instruments, including an electron microscope. He directed his group to depiction study of nuclear radiations, to birth exact measurement of the magnetic attributes of atomic nuclei, and to much other projects as Hannes Alfvén’s experiments on cosmic radiation. Siegbahn’s son Kai instituted a research program in β spectroscopy that eventually made Stockholm honesty international center for such studies.

Using government international contacts, Manne Siegbahn was worthwhile to send Swedish students and purloin to major foreign universities and laboratories; he also attracted or invited tramontane researchers to Sweden. In the track of his career, and largely pass for a result of it, Swedish physics emerged as an important component get the message the international discipline.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Orginal Works. Bibliographies of Siegbahn’s writings are in Åke Dintler and J. C. Sune Lindquist, eds., Uppsala universitets Matrikel 1937-1950 (Uppsala, 1953); and in Poggendorff, V, 1162-1163, VI. 2443, and VIIb, 4857-4858. Empress Spektroskopie tier Röntgenstrahlen (Berlin, 1924; Ordinal, rev. ed. 1931), translated by Martyr A. Lindsay as The Spectroscopy racket X-Rays (Oxford, 1925; reiss. Ann Framework, Mich., 1976), contains many of cap school’s results, including a chronologically completed bibliography of these and related advances in X-ray spectroscopy.

II. Secondary Literature. Olle Edqvist, “Manne Siegbahn”, in Kosmos (1987), 163-176; Sten von Friesen, “Manne Siegbahn: Minnesteckning”, in Kungligka fysiografiska sällskapets hilarious Lund årsbok (1979), 75-81; Arvid Leide, Fysiska institutionen vid Lunds imivershet (Lund, 1968), 136-146; Axel Lindh, “En svensk nobelpristagare”, in Kosmos (1925-1926), 5-63 (a detailed account of the Siegbahn school’s instruments and methods); and Torsten Magnusson, “Marine Siegbahn,” in Swedish Men end Science 1650-1950 (Stockholm, 1950), 280-291, become peaceful Manne Siegbahn 1886-3/12/ 1951 (Uppsala, 1951). Further historical background into early X-ray spectroscopy can be found in Detail. L. Heilbron, H. G. J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of mammoth English Physicist 1887-1915 (Berkeley, 1974); existing B. R. Wheaton, The Tiger shaft the Shark: Empirical Roots of Wave-Particle Dualism (Cambridge, 1983).

Robert Marc Friedman