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Herbert Fröhlich

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Herbert Fröhlich
Herbert Fröhlich (1905–1991)
Born(1905-12-09)9 December 1905
Rexingen, Württemberg, German Empire
Died23 January 1991(1991-01-23) (aged 86)
Liverpool, England, UK
NationalityBritish
Alma materLudwig-Maximilians University
Known for
SpouseFanchon Fröhlich
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsPhysicist
Institutions
Doctoral advisorArnold Sommerfeld
Doctoral students
Other notable students
Signature
Notes
He is the brother of the mathematician Albrecht Fröhlich.

Herbert Fröhlich (9 December 1905 – 23 January 1991) FRS[1] was a German-born British physicist.[6][7]

Career

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In 1927, Fröhlich entered Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich to study physics, and received his doctorate under Arnold Sommerfeld in 1930.[2] His first position was as Privatdozent at the University of Freiburg. Due to rising anti-Semitism and the Deutsche Physik movement under Adolf Hitler, and at the invitation of Yakov Frenkel, Fröhlich went to the Soviet Union, in 1933, to work at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad. During the Great Purge following the murder of Sergei Kirov, he fled to England in 1935. Except for a short visit to the Netherlands and a brief internment during World War II, he worked in Nevill Francis Mott's[1] department, at the University of Bristol, until 1948, rising to the position of Reader. At the invitation of James Chadwick, he took the Chair for Theoretical Physics at the University of Liverpool.[1][8]

In 1950, Bell Telephone Laboratories offered Fröhlich their endowed professorial position at Princeton University. However, at Liverpool he had a purely research post which was attractive to him. He was then newly married to an American, Fanchon Angst, who was studying linguistic philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford under P. F. Strawson, and who did not want to return to the United States at that time.[9][10][11][12][13]

From 1973, he was Professor of Solid State Physics at the University of Salford, however, all the while maintaining an office at the University of Liverpool, where he gained emeritus status in 1976 and remained there until his death. During 1981, he was a visiting professor at Purdue University.[14][15] He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 and in 1964.[16]

Fröhlich, who pursued theoretical research notably in the fields of superconductivity and bioelectrodynamics, proposed a theory of coherent excitations in biological systems known as Fröhlich coherence.[17][18][19][20][21] A system that attains this coherent state is known as a Fröhlich condensate, similar to room-temperature non-equilibrium Bose–Einstein condensation of quasiparticles.[22][23][24][25][26]

Honours and awards

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Fröhlich was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1951.[1] In 1972, he was awarded the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft Max-Planck Medal and in 1981 an Honorary Doctorate from Purdue University.[27]

Books by Fröhlich

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  • Herbert Fröhlich Elektronentheorie der Metalle. (Struktur und Eigenschaften der Materie in Eigendarstellung, Bd.18). (Springer, 1936, 1969)
  • Herbert Fröhlich Elektronentheorie der Metalle (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, First US edition, in German, 1943) ISBN 1-114-56648-9
  • Herbert Fröhlich Theory of Dielectrics: Dielectric Constant and Dielectric Loss (Clarendon Press, 1949, 1958)
  • Herbert Fröhlich and F. Kremer Coherent Excitations in Biological Systems (Springer-Verlag, 1983) ISBN 978-3-642-69186-7
  • Herbert Fröhlich, editor Biological Coherence and Response to External Stimuli (Springer, 1988) ISBN 978-3-642-73309-3

Personal life

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Fröhlich was the son of Fanny Frida (née Schwarz) and Jakob Julius Fröhlich, members of an old-established Jewish family in their home town of Rexingen, and the brother of Albrecht Fröhlich, a mathematician who was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1976.[28][29]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e Mott, N. (1992). "Herbert Fröhlich 9 December 1905 – 23 January 1991". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 38: 145–162. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1992.0008. S2CID 123600343.
  2. ^ a b c Herbert Fröhlich at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ a b c Measuring state-of-order by dielectric response: A comprehensive review on Fröhlich entropy estimation – J. Parravicini, GB. Parravicini, Measuring state-of-order by dielectric response: A comprehensive review on Fröhlich entropy estimation, Results in Physics, v. 28, 104571 (2021)
  4. ^ a b c Parravicini, J. (2018). "Thermodynamic potentials in anisotropic and nonlinear dielectrics". Physica B. 541: 54–60. Bibcode:2018PhyB..541...54P. doi:10.1016/j.physb.2018.04.029. S2CID 125817506.
  5. ^ Macroscopic response and directional disorder dynamics in chemically substituted ferroelectrics – J. Parravicini, E. DelRe, A.J. Agranat, GB. Parravicini, Macroscopic response and directional disorder dynamics in chemically substituted ferroelectrics, Phys. Rev. B, v. 93, 094203 (2016)
  6. ^ Terence W. Barrett and Herbert A. Pohl Energy Transfer Dynamics: Studies and Essays in Honor of Herbert Frohlich on His Eightieth Birthday (Springer-Verlag, 1987) ISBN 978-3-540-17502-5
  7. ^ GJ Hyland and Peter Rowlands (editors) Herbert Frohlich FRS: A Physicist Ahead of his Time. (University of Liverpool, 2006, 2nd edition 2008.) ISBN 978-0-906370-57-5
  8. ^ Biography of Herbert Frohlich (1905–1991) – Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics
  9. ^ "Fanchon Frohlich". Fanchon Frohlich Artist Philosopher. 2020. Retrieved 6 April 2020.
  10. ^ Hyland, Gerard (8 September 2016). "Fanchon Fröhlich obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 April 2020.
  11. ^ Hyland, G.J. (2015). Herbert Fröhlich: A Physicist Ahead of His Time. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. pp. 120–121.
  12. ^ "Audrey F Aungst in the 1930 United States Federal Census". Ancestry.com. 2 April 1930. Retrieved 6 April 2020.
  13. ^ "Obituary for JOSEPH AUNCST [sic] (Aged 74)". The Courier (Waterloo, Iowa). 28 June 1944. Retrieved 6 April 2020.
  14. ^ Fröhlich – Purdue University
  15. ^ Fröhlich, Herbert FRS (1905–1991), Physicist Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine – University of Liverpool
  16. ^ Nobel Prize Nominations
  17. ^ Fröhlich, H. (March 1968). "Bose condensation of strongly excited longitudinal electric modes" (PDF). Physics Letters A. 26 (9): 402–403. Bibcode:1968PhLA...26..402F. doi:10.1016/0375-9601(68)90242-9.
  18. ^ Fröhlich, H. (September 1968). "Long-Range Coherence and Energy Storage in Biological Systems" (PDF). International Journal of Quantum Chemistry. 2 (5): 641–649. Bibcode:1968IJQC....2..641F. doi:10.1002/qua.560020505.
  19. ^ Fröhlich, H. (July 1977). "Long-range coherence in biological systems" (PDF). La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento. 7 (3): 399–418. Bibcode:1977NCimR...7..399F. doi:10.1007/BF02747279. S2CID 121598507.
  20. ^ Fröhlich, Herbert; Kremer, Friedrich, eds. (1983). Coherent Excitations in Biological Systems. Proceedings in Life Sciences. Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-69186-7. ISBN 978-3-642-69188-1. S2CID 27896466.
  21. ^ Fröhlich, Herbert, ed. (1988). Biological Coherence and Response to External Stimuli. Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-73309-3. ISBN 978-3-642-73311-6.
  22. ^ Moskalenko, S. A.; Pokatilov, E. P; Miglei, M. F.; Kiselyova, E. S. (October 1979). "Bose condensation of phonons in biological systems" (PDF). Quantum Chemistry. 16 (4): 745–752. doi:10.1002/qua.560160405.
  23. ^ Wu, T. M. (October 1994). "Chapter 16: Fröhlich's Theory of Coherent Excitation — A Retrospective" (PDF). In Ho, Mae-Wan; Popp, Fritz-Albert; Warnke, Ulrich (eds.). Bioelectrodynamics and Biocommunication. World Scientific. pp. 387–409. doi:10.1142/9789814503822_0016.
  24. ^ Catherine Meyers (13 October 2015). "Quantum Coherent-like State Observed in a Biological Protein for the First Time". American Institute of Physics.
  25. ^ Katona, Gergely; et al. (October 2015). "Terahertz radiation induces non-thermal structural changes associated with Fröhlich condensation in a protein crystal". Structural Dynamics. 2 (5): 054702. doi:10.1063/1.4931825. PMC 4711649. PMID 26798828.
  26. ^ Zhang, Zhedong; Agarwal, Girish S.; Scully, Marlan O. (19 April 2019). "Quantum Fluctuations in the Fröhlich Condensate of Molecular Vibrations Driven Far From Equilibrium". Physical Review Letters. 122 (15): 158101. arXiv:1810.07883. Bibcode:2019PhRvL.122o8101Z. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.158101. PMID 31050540. S2CID 53322370.
  27. ^ Honorary Doctorate Recipient – Purdue University
  28. ^ Hyland, G.J. (2015). Herbert Fröhlich: A Physicist Ahead of His Time. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. p. 5.
  29. ^ "Archives of UK's 11 important scientists' work to be preserved for posterity". Archived from the original on 23 January 2015. Retrieved 23 January 2015.
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