The contribution of the Gottingen school to solid state physics: 1920-40

Abstract

The central figure in the story of experimental solid state physics in Göttingen is Professor R. W. Pohl, the director of the ‘Erstes Physikalisches Institut’ throughout these years. Pohl provided not only the continuity but much of the inspiration for the work, and was the active teacher, adviser, supervisor and father-figure to the succeeding generations of his research students and collaborators. Pohl was born in Hamburg in 1884 and died in Göttingen in 1976. He was nominally Professor of Physics in Göttingen from 1916 to his retirement in 1952, but in fact was not able to take up his post till 1919. The Department of Physics was a venerable one; founded in 1789 with Lichtenberg as the first professor, it included among Pohl’s predecessors no less a figure than Wilhelm Weber (1831-7 and 1849-74). After his doctorate in Berlin under E. Warburg, in 1906, Pohl continued to work in Berlin, first on the physics of X-rays with Drude, Rubens and Wehnelt and later with P. Pringsheim on the photoelectric effect. The outbreak of World War I interrupted his work on the photoemission of electrons from alkali metals. During this work Pohl and Pringsheim developed the method of vacuum deposition of metals.® 2>