Heinz Maier-Leibnitz

Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (28 March 1911 in Esslingen am Neckar – 16 December 2000 in Allensbach) was a German physicist. He made contributions to nuclear spectroscopy, coincidence measurement techniques, radioactive tracers for biochemistry and medicine, and neutron optics. He was an influential educator and an advisor to the Federal Republic of Germany on nuclear programs.

During World War II, Maier-Leibnitz worked at the Institute of Physics of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, in Heidelberg. After the war, he spent a year working in North America, after which he returned to the Institute of Physics. In 1952, he assumed the Chair for Technical Physics and directorship of the Laboratory for Technical Physics at the Technische Hochschule München. He became a leader in establishing and building centers which used nuclear reactors as neutron sources for research. The first was the Research Reactor Munich, which was the seed for the entire Garching research campus of the Technische Hochschule München. The second was the German-French project to construct a high-flux neutron source and found the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France; he was also its first director. His leadership also helped establish the Physics Department at the Technische Hochschule München. Maier-Leibnitz was the chairman of a special committee for designing the German Nuclear Program, and thus he was the architect of the first full-scale nuclear program of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was a signatory of the Göttingen Manifest.

In his honor, the German Research Foundation annually awards six scientists with the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis. The research reactor Forschungsreaktor München II is officially named Forschungsneutronenquelle Heinz Maier-Leibnitz.

Maier-Leibnitz studied physics at the Universität Stuttgart and the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. He received his doctorate in 1935, from the University of Göttingen, under the Nobel Laureate James Franck and Georg Joos – Franck had emigrated from Germany in 1933 and his successor was Joos. Maier-Leibnitz was in the field of atomic physics, and he discovered metastable, negative helium ions, which later had applications in particle accelerators.

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