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Otto Haxel Facts

Otto Haxel Facts
Otto Haxel (April 2, 1909 to February 26, 1998) was a German nuclear physicist. He founded the Institute of Environmental physics and was a member of the German Atomic Energy Commission.
Interesting Otto Haxel Facts:
Otto Haxel was born in New-Ulm, Germany.
From 1927 to 1933 he studied at the University of Munich.
In 1933 received his doctorate at the University of Tubingen where his doctoral advisor was Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger counter.
From 1933 to 1936 he worked as Geiger's teaching assistant at the University of Tubingen.
After he completed his habilitation in 1936 he became a teaching assistant and lecturer at at the Technische Hochschule Berlin.
From 1940 to 1942 he was a member of the Uranium Club, also known as the German nuclear energy project.
His specialty was the neutron absorption properties of uranium.
In 1942 he was drafted into the military where he worked on nuclear research under Admiral Rhein.
From 1946 to 1950 he worked with Werner Heisenberg at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Gottingen.
He also worked on the development of magic number in nuclear shell theory with J. Hans Jensen.
Jensen and Maria Goppert-Mayer later shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for this work.
In the 1950's he and 17 other German scientists signed the Manifesto of the Gottingen Eighteen.
The Manifesto stated their opposition to arming the German military with tactical nuclear weapons.
From 1950 to 1974 he was professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg.
In 1956 and 1957 he was a member of the Nuclear Physics Working Group of the German Atomic Energy Commission.
From 1970 to 1975 he was the Scientific and Technical Managing Director of the Karlsruhe Research Center.


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