Hans von Halban

Hans von Halban
Hans von Halban in 1942
Born	(1908-01-24)24 January 1908 Leipzig, Saxony, Germany
Died	28 November 1964(1964-11-28) (aged 56) Paris, France
Nationality	French
Fields	Physics
Alma mater	University of Zurich
Doctoral advisor	Edgar Meyer ()

Hans Heinrich von Halban (24 January 1908 – 28 November 1964) was a French physicist, of Austrian-Jewish descent.

He was descended on his father's side from Polish Jews, who left Kraków for Vienna in the 1850s. His grandfather, Heinrich Blumenstock, was a senior official in the Habsburg Empire and was ennobled by Emperor Franz Joseph I in the 1880s, taking the name of Ritter Heinrich Blumenstock von Halban. The surname Blumenstock was subsequently dropped by the family, as was the use of 'von' after the Second World War. His mother's family was from Bohemia and his great-grandfather, Moritz von Fialka, was a colonel in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866.

Although converted to Catholicism, the family were never religiously observant. Hans Halban was a convinced secularist.

Hans Halban was born in Leipzig and moved to Würzburg, where his father, Hans von Halban Sr. became a professor of physical chemistry. He began his studies in physics at Frankfurt/Main and finished his doctoral studies at the University of Zurich December 1934.

He then worked for two years with the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr at the Institute of Physics, University of Copenhagen. In collaboration with Otto Frisch he discovered that heavy water had very low neutron absorption compared with ordinary water.